Cohen: Trump directed hush payments
During campaign, the soon-to-be president ‘of course’ knew deals wrong, lawyer says
WASHINGTON — Michael Cohen said in an interview broadcast Friday that he knew arranging payments during the 2016 campaign to quiet two women who claimed to have had affairs with President Donald Trump was wrong. And, he said, Trump knew it was wrong at the time, too.
“Of course,” Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, said when asked by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos whether the president was fully aware of what he was doing when Cohen made the payments.
Cohen was speaking publicly for the first time since he was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to helping to arrange payments to the two women, a violation of campaign finance law, and to lying to Congress about the duration of deliberations about a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow.
“I am angry at myself because I knew what I was doing was wrong,” Cohen said, his eyes swollen and purple, but he said he had come to terms with the value of telling the truth.
“I am done with the lying,” he said. “I am done being loyal to President Trump.”
While Cohen’s legal troubles may have reached a resolution, he could continue to cause problems for Trump.
Cohen has given information to prosecutors that has implicated Trump in campaign finance law violations, saying that Trump authorized him to arrange the hush payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. If corroborated, that could be significant, since under the criminal campaign finance statutes, prosecutors must prove that the defendant understood the law and was knowingly breaking it.
At one point in the interview, Stephanopoulos asked if Trump’s denial that he had ordered him to make the payments was true.
“I don’t think there is anybody that believes that,” Cohen responded. “First of all, nothing at the Trump Organization was ever done unless it was run through Trump. He directed me, as I said in my allocution and I said as well in the plea, he directed me to make the payments, he directed me to become involved in these matters.”
Trump on Thursday also dismissed the significance of the campaign finance allegations, which he said were civil violations at best. But he said that if there were any legal issues, he had expected Cohen, as his lawyer, to know that, and he accused Cohen of trying to embarrass him.
“It is absolutely not true,” Cohen said in the ABC interview. “Under no circumstances do I want to embarrass the president.”
Cohen, who once said he would take a bullet for Trump, said he had been loyal “to someone who truthfully does not deserve loyalty.”
“One of the hopes that I have out of the punishment that I’ve received,” he added, “as well as the cooperation that I have given, I will be remembered in history as helping to bring this country back together.”
Cohen, who began working for the Trump Organization in 2007, said that the Trump of today was not the same person he once knew.
“It was just a change,” he said. “I will tell you that the gentleman that is sitting now in the Oval Office — 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — is not the Donald Trump that I remember from Trump Tower.”
One possible reason, he added, is that the pressure of the job is much more than what he thought it was going to be.
Cohen said that he now saw himself as the person tasked by fate with helping the country.
“It’s never good to be on the wrong side of the president of the United States of America, but somehow or another this task has now fallen onto my shoulders,” he said, then added, “I will spend the rest of my life in order to fix the mistake that I made.”
Asked about Cohen’s remarks Friday, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said the news media was “giving credence to someone who’s a convicted, selfadmitted liar.”