China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Trump says Cohen lied; Dems push
US President Donald Trump accused his former lawyer Michael Cohen of lying under pressure of prosecution Wednesday as his White House grappled with allegations that the president had orchestrated a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of two women who claimed he had affairs with them.
The conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on tax and bank fraud charges and the guilty plea of Cohen on tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations on Tuesday grew out of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of potential Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
Meanwhile, Democrats looked to press a political opening. Some pounced on the news as a way to organize and raise money for November when they are trying to pick up 23 seats in the House of Representatives and two seats in the Senate to gain majorities in both chambers and blunt Trump’s legislative agenda.
Trump took to Twitter to accuse Cohen of making up “stories in order to get a ‘deal’” from federal prosecutors. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in coordination with Trump.
At a White House briefing on Wednesday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at least seven times that Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges.
She referred substantive questions to the president’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland. Outside allies of the White House said they had received little guidance on how to respond to the events in their appearances on cable news. And it was not clear the West Wing was assembling any kind of coordinated response.
Trump himself publicly denied wrongdoing, sitting down with his favored program Fox & Friends for an interview set to air Thursday. In the interview, he argued that the hush-money payouts weren’t “even a campaign violation” because he subsequently reimbursed Cohen for the payments personally.
Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
Cohen had said Tuesday he secretly used shell companies to make payments used to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
Trump has insisted that he found out about the payments only after they were made, despite the release of a September 2016 taped conversation in which Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing a deal to pay McDougal for her story of a 2006 affair she says she had with Trump.
That Cohen was in trouble was no surprise — federal prosecutors raided his offices months ago — but Trump and his allies were caught off-guard when he also pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes.
Meanwhile, Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said Wednesday that Cohen has information “that would be of interest” to the special counsel.
“There are subjects that Michael Cohen could address that would be of interest to the special counsel,” Davis said in a series of television interviews. Davis also said Cohen is not looking for a presidential pardon.