President lauds ‘brave’ Manafort, rips Cohen
Trump plays down wrongdoing by former campaign chairman, former lawyer
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday praised his just-convicted former campaign chairman for refusing to “break” and cooperate with federal prosecutors investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, expressing appreciation for the personal loyalty of a felon found guilty of defrauding the U.S. government.
In a series of tweets the morning after an extraordinary day in which Paul Manafort, his former campaign chief, was convicted of tax and bank fraud and his longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations he said were directed by Trump, the president appeared to suggest he was more concerned with the fallout for himself than with the crimes.
He compared Cohen unfavorably with Manafort, attacking Cohen as a bad lawyer who had caved to pressure from biased federal prosecutors while lauding Manafort as a “brave man” with a “wonderful family” who had stood strong.
“‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ — make up stories in order to get a ‘deal,’ ” Trump wrote, his quotation marks suggesting his disdain for the Justice Department.
The president played down the wrongdoing by both men, noting that the jury in Manafort’s case convicted him of eight counts of fraud but did not reach a conclusion on 10 other charges. “Witch Hunt!” Trump proclaimed. He was harsher on Cohen, writing that if anybody wanted a good lawyer, he “would strongly suggest” not hiring him. But the president also claimed falsely that the felonies to which Cohen pleaded guilty were, in fact, “not a crime.”
At the White House, the mood was somber as aides struggled to come to grips with news that raised profound questions about Trump and the future of his presidency, including whether he had lied to the American public, whether he would be impeached and whether he considered himself above the law.
Pressed on those issues by reporters at a news briefing Wednesday afternoon, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, insisted there was no crisis afoot in the West Wing. She said neither Manafort’s conviction nor Cohen’s guilty plea had anything to do with Trump, and they did not have any bearing on him.
“The president has done nothing wrong,” Sanders said during the unusually subdued question-and-answer session. “There are no charges against him. There is no collusion.”
Grim-faced as she fielded a variety of questions about Manafort and Cohen and the implications of their misdeeds for the president, Sanders recited the three-part denial again and again, as if to will the issue away.
“Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal doesn’t mean that implicates the president on anything,” she said.
Cohen pleaded guilty to two campaign finance crimes, one over a $130,000 payment he made to a pornographic film actress, Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. The other was tied to an arrangement with a tabloid that bought the rights to a story about a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, and then killed it, paying her $150,000.
In the plea agreement, Trump is not mentioned by name but is referred to as “Individual-1” and, at one point, as “Individual-1, who at that point had become the president of the United States.” Prosecutors said the payment to Clifford was a campaign donation because it secured her silence to help Trump’s odds of winning the election. Campaign finance laws prohibited donations of more than $2,700 in the 2016 general election.
In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Trump — who could be heard in an audio recording released last month discussing with Cohen arrangements for the payment to be made to McDougal — said he had become aware of the payments only after they were made. He emphasized that the payments Cohen admitted to in his guilty plea did not come from campaign funds.
“My first question when I heard about it was, ‘Did they come out of the campaign?’ ” Trump said. “Because that could be a little dicey.”
In fact, payments from either Trump’s personal or corporate accounts could prompt campaign finance reporting requirements.
Sanders said the president had not lied about the payments when he initially said he did not know about them. She called it “a ridiculous allegation” and refused to say whether the White House stood by its denial of the affairs, saying, “We’ve addressed this a number of times.”
The president also repeated his assertion that Cohen pleaded guilty to crimes that were merely violations and compared that with the way former President Barack Obama was treated because of a campaign finance violation during the 2008 presidential race. He only had to pay a fine.
“He had a massive campaign violation, but he had a different attorney general, and they viewed it a lot differently,” Trump said of Obama, adding a jab at his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
Trump was referring to a Federal Election Commission finding in 2013 that during Obama’s 2008 campaign he did not file finance reports in a timely manner. Obama’s violation was a civil one, unlike the felonies Cohen admitted to Tuesday — making a campaign donation above the legal limit and doing so, in Cohen’s words, “to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information.”
“Inadvertent violations like Obama’s are punished civilly” by the Federal Election Commission, Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told Vox. But criminal violations are handled as was Cohen’s, in court.