DON: YES, I DID MAKE ‘MISTAKE’
Shouldn’t have hired ‘nice guy’ att’y Cohen
President Trump conceded Thursday he should never have hired Michael Cohen but insisted his hands were clean because he never ordered the prison-bound barrister to do anything illegal.
The President’s rare display of regret comes as he faces intense scrutiny over his possible involvement in a criminal conspiracy to silence his reported paramours and influence the 2016 election.
“In retrospect, I think I did a mistake,” Trump told Fox News of his retaining Cohen as his personal attorney and fixer over a decade ago.
Trump added he only hired Cohen because “he was a very nice guy.”
Weighing in for the first time since Cohen was sentenced to three years behind bars, Trump earlier in the day maintained in a string of tweets he “never directed” his former cleanup man “to break the law.”
Trump has repeatedly changed his tune about his involvement in illegal hush money payments Cohen made to a pair of the President’s alleged former mistresses just before the election.
“He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law,” Trump tweeted. “It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”
However, Cohen, federal prosecutors and even U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley agreed at Cohen’s sentencing that the payments were made at Trump’s direction to influence the presidential election — a direct violation of campaign finance laws. Prosecutors have implicated Trump in a crime, but haven’t directly accused him of one.
“Cohen acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” prosecutors stated plainly in court documents, in a thinly-veiled reference to the President.
Trump has at times denied having any knowledge of the payments made to former Playmate Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels and, at others, essentially confirmed he was aware of the under-the-table deals, but argued they were perfectly legal.
The President pushed the latter explanation on Thursday and even accused prosecutors for the Southern District of New York of charging Cohen with campaign finance crimes in a deliberate effort to make him look bad.
“Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me, but he pleaded to two campaign charges which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty even on a civil basis,” Trump tweeted. “Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence.”
Despite the President’s claims, the McDougal and Daniels payoffs violate campaign finance laws because they exceeded the $2,700 donation limit and weren’t reported to the Federal Election Commission even though they were explicitly issued to benefit Trump’s campaign.
A teary-eyed Cohen, who famously claimed he was willing to “take a bullet” for Trump, said in court Wednesday that his “blind loyalty” led him to cover up the President’s “dirty deeds” and “take a path of darkness instead of light.”
He was sentenced to three years in prison for a slew of charges including evading taxes, lying to Congress, bank fraud and the campaign finance violations.
Later Wednesday, prosecutors revealed that the owner of the National Enquirer has admitted the company paid off McDougal to bury her tale of a tryst that could have jeopardized Trump’s White House bid. The U.S. attorney’s office in New York has reached a non-prosecution agreement with American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s parent company.
Prosecutors disclosed that the intent of the $150,000 payment to McDougal in August 2016 “was to suppress the model’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”
Switching gears, Trump followed up his Cohen-bashing tweets with one praising Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the presidential transition.
“They gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated — the FBI said he didn’t lie and they overrode the FBI,” Trump tweeted, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.