Trump disputes Cohen claim of knowing of Russia meeting
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday issued a fresh rebuttal against his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, maintaining that he did not know in advance about a June 2016 meeting in which Russians had promised to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The statement, made by Trump in morning tweets, escalates the public feud between the president and his longtime fixer. It comes on the heels of a report by CNN Thursday evening that Cohen has said he is willing to testify that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the 2016 meeting in Trump Tower. “I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr,” Trump declared on Twitter Friday morning.
He lashed out at Cohen without naming him, saying, “Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!”
One of Cohen’s attorneys is Lanny Davis, a longtime friend and adviser to the Clintons.
Cohen is under federal investigation for bank fraud as well as possible campaign finance violations, and FBI agents are scrutinizing whether he had inflated the value of his taxi medallion business to seek additional financing.
Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and others have repeatedly said that the president knew nothing about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting until he was asked about it by reporters in July 2017.
CNN reported that Cohen claims he was present, along with several others, when Trump was informed of the Russians’ offer by Trump Jr. in 2016. Cohen has told people that Trump approved going ahead with the meeting with the Russians. Cohen’s credibility was challenged Thursday evening by the president’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. The former New York mayor said in an interview late Thursday with the Post that Cohen “isn’t credible at all, and there are witnesses who know what he’s claiming isn’t true.”
Giuliani declined to name the witnesses.
When asked if Trump would be willing to talk about the Russian meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller, Giuliani said, “I still have my doubts about the people around Mueller” and said the president’s team remained undecided about whether to agree to a sit-down conversation with federal investigators about that topic and others.
“The president is willing to talk about anything, but it’d be wrong to subject him to that,” Giuliani said, adding that the Russian meeting “hasn’t come up in our conversations” with Mueller and his team.
Giuliani said that if Cohen is aiming for a pardon by threatening to testify about the June 2016 meeting, “this is a stupid way to do it.”
“I don’t want the president to consider a pardon, but you don’t get one by lying,” he said. Davis said earlier this week that Cohen is not seeking a pardon.
At the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Trump Jr. was joined by his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort. There were several native Russians in the room, including Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with links to the Kremlin.
After news of the meeting broke in July 2017, the Trump team initially offered a misleading explanation of the session. A first statement said that the participants had mostly discussed adoption of Russian orphans in the United States.
Testimony and documents revealed the meeting stemmed from an email sent by a music publicist to Trump Jr. in which the Trump campaign was promised “some official documents and information” that constituted “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”