Trump: Didn’t tell Cohen to break law

Ex-lawyer trying to embarrass him, get less prison time, president says

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump denied Thursday that he had directed his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to break the law during the 2016 campaign by buying the silence of women who claimed they once had affairs with the future president.

In morning tweets, Trump, however, did not dispute that he had directed Cohen to make the payments, as Cohen and federal prosecutors have alleged.

The president said Cohen bore responsibility for any criminal violations of campaign finance law but also asserted that Cohen “probably was not guilty” of even civil violations related to the payments to former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels — a view at odds with that of many lawyers.

Cohen pleaded guilty in New York in August, saying that “Individual-1” — widely identified as Trump — schemed to silence two women about affairs with the Republican candidate before the 2016 election. Cohen acknowledged that such payments amounted to illegal campaign donations and said he arranged for them at Trump’s behest.

“Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did,” Trump alleged.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday for what U.S. District Judge William Pauley called a “veritable smorgasbord of criminal conduct.” The reduced sentence reflected the information he shared with federal prosecutors. Cohen had faced a lengthier sentence for his crimes of tax evasion, bank fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.

Trump’s tweets Thursday were his first public comments about Cohen since Cohen’s sentencing. On Wednesday afternoon, the president ignored questions shouted by reporters about his onetime loyalist.

Trump largely echoed his tweets in a television interview broadcast Thursday afternoon.

“I never directed him to do anything wrong,” Trump told Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, speaking about

Cohen. “Whatever he did he did on his own. … I never directed him to do anything incorrect or wrong.”

“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law,” Trump said. “He was a lawyer, and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”

Trump sought to minimize his relationship with Cohen, saying he did “more public relations than law” and was generally responsible for “low-level work.”

Trump said he now regrets having hired Cohen.

“In retrospect, I made a mistake,” he said. “It happens, I hire usually good people.”

During an earlier interview on Fox News on Thursday, Lanny Davis, an adviser to Cohen, said Trump’s credibility is questionable. Davis pointed to an assertion Trump made in April to reporters aboard Air Force One that he knew nothing about a $130,000 payment to Daniels to silence her about their alleged decade-old dalliance.

The White House has since changed its story. In a television interview in May, Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said Trump had repaid Cohen for the money he gave to Daniels. The next day, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was pressed by reporters on why she had previously denied that Trump had any knowledge of the payment. Sanders said she had “given the best information I had at the time.”

During his sentencing hearing Wednesday, Cohen said he pleaded to the court for leniency to end his legal troubles and spare his family more embarrassment in the future. He also said he refused to sign a full cooperation agreement, as most defendants in the Southern District of New York do, because, “I do not need a cooperation agreement to be in place to do the right thing.”

A full cooperation agreement in the Southern District of New York would require Cohen to admit to every crime he has ever committed and provide details about the crimes of others.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors also announced a cooperation deal with the National Enquirer’s parent company, in which the company acknowledged paying McDougal to “suppress the woman’s story” and “prevent it from influencing the election.”

Prosecutors announced that they would not prosecute the company, American Media Inc. for its role in a scheme to tilt the presidential race in favor of Trump. In the agreement, American Media said it would cooperate with prosecutors and admitted that it paid McDougal $150,000 before the 2016 election to silence her allegations of an affair with Trump.

During the Fox interview, Trump emphasized that he had not reimbursed American Media for that hush money.

“I don’t think, and I have to go check, I don’t think they even paid any money to that tabloid, OK,” he said. “I don’t think we made a payment to that tabloid.”

The deal signaled the unraveling of the deep relationship Trump and American Media Inc. chief executive David Pecker had forged over decades.

In a tweet later Thursday morning, Trump weighed in on the fate of another associate, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is scheduled to be sentenced next week for lying to investigators.

“They gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated,” Trump wrote, referring to prosecutors on the team of special counsel Robert Muller, who is investigating Russian election interference. “They want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. Sad!”

A federal judge Wednesday ordered Flynn and the special counsel to turn over additional investigative records describing his January 2017 interview with FBI agents — a conversation in which Flynn later admitted he lied.

Last week, special counsel Robert Mueller told the court that he was seeking no prison time for Flynn, describing him as a critical cooperating witness in the special counsel probe and other ongoing investigations.

Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner, Carol Leonning, Sarah Ellison and Paul Farhi of The Washington Post; by Terrence Dopp and Bill Faries of Bloomberg News; and by Eileen Sullivan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.