Trump takes aim at former lawyer

Tweets slam Cohen over testimony, purported book plan

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump sought Friday to attack the credibility of his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen by pointing to a book he has reportedly proposed that depicts Trump far more favorably than did the scathing testimony he delivered to Congress this week.

“Book is exact opposite of his fake testimony, which now is a lie!” Trump said in morning tweets, in which he accused Cohen of committing perjury during a congressional hearing and called on Congress to demand the book manuscript, which Trump claimed was recently finished.

“Your heads will spin when you see the lies, misrepresentations and contradictions against his Thursday testimony,” Trump wrote. “Like a different person! He is totally discredited!”

Cohen spent three days on Capitol Hill this week in a series of public and private hearings in which he apologized for previously lying to lawmakers and divulged what he said Trump knew about financial infractions and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In a public hearing before a House hearing on Wednesday, Cohen also attacked Trump’s character, calling him a con man and a racist and voicing deep regret for working by his side for more than a decade.

In the wake of Cohen’s testimony, the president and his Republican allies have aggressively sought to discredit the former Trump loyalist, who was sentenced to prison last year in part for lying to Congress.

On Thursday, Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Mark Meadows, R-N.C., wrote to Attorney General William Barr, asking him to investigate whether Cohen had perjured himself this week when he insisted during his testimony that he had not wanted a job in the Trump administration and had been content to serve as Trump’s personal lawyer.

In a statement Thursday night, Lanny Davis, a lawyer for Cohen, said that he had testified truthfully during the Wednesday hearing before the House Oversight Committee.

“It may not be surprising that two pro-Trump Committee members … now have made a baseless criminal referral,” Davis said. “In my opinion, it is a sad misuse of the criminal justice system with the aura of pure partisanship.”

Davis did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on Trump’s morning tweets.

In his Friday tweets, Trump highlighted Davis’ associations with the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, whom he referred to as “Crooked Hillary.”

The president also referred to a description of Cohen’s book as a “love letter to Trump.” That echoed a characterization of a Cohen book proposal by journalist Liz Plank of Vox Media during a February 2018 appearance on MSNBC.

During that broadcast, MSNBC host Ari Melber said Cohen had confirmed to him that he was working on a “tell-all book” about Trump.

In other tweets Friday, Trump suggested Democrats were using Cohen to investigate his business dealings and finances because of special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign “has fallen apart.”

Trump repeated his call to “stop this corrupt and illegally brought Witch Hunt” and said prosecutors should start looking at Democrats “where real crimes were committed.”

Separately, the Nielsen company says that 15.8 million people tuned in to watch Cohen testify before the House Oversight Committee.

Nielsen estimated the viewership on eight different networks between 9:45 a.m. and 3 p.m. on Wednesday.

The number contrasts with the 20.4 million who watched the daytime testimony of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before a Senate committee last September.

Fans of Fox News Channel were responsible for the bulk of the difference. The numbers suggest they were more interested in watching Kavanaugh deny a woman’s accusations that he had groped her drunkenly at a high school party.

An estimated 5.7 million people watched Kavanaugh on Fox last year, while 2.3 million turned on Fox for Cohen coverage, Nielsen said Friday.

CBS, with 3.06 million viewers, led the networks for Cohen coverage, followed by ABC’s 2.95 million. MSNBC, with 2.82 million viewers beat its broadcast sister, NBC, which had 2.48 million viewers. CNN had just under 2.1 million.