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Cohen ends week of testifying
GOP reps refer president’s former lawyer to DOJ for alleged lying during testimony
Intelligence chairman said the eight-hour interview with the president’s former lawyer was productive.
WASHINGTON — Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, was interviewed behind closed doors Thursday by the House intelligence committee for more than eight hours, the last of his three appearances before Congress this week.
He said as he left that he would be returning to Capitol Hill on March 6 for another round of questioning with the same panel after publicly branding his former boss a racist and a con man who lied about business dealings in Russia and directed him to conceal extramarital relationships.
House intelligence Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff called the closed-door session with Cohen productive and said lawmakers were able to “drill down in great detail” on issues they are investigating. Schiff said the committee will also hear from Felix Sater, a Russiaborn executive who worked with Cohen on an ultimately unsuccessful deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, in an open hearing March 14.
Two of Trump’s most vocal defenders, GOP Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina, sent a referral to the Justice Department alleging Cohen lied in his testimony. Their letter to Attorney General William Barr details several Cohen statements they said were false, including claims that he “never defrauded any bank” and did not want a job in Trump’s White House.
They pointed to Cohen’s guilty plea for making false statements to a banking institution and to court filings that say Cohen told friends he wanted a White House job.
Cohen, who pleaded guilty last year to lying to Congress about the Moscow real estate project and reports to prison soon for a three-year sentence, gave harsh testimony about Trump on Wednesday. He said Trump knew in advance that damaging emails about Democrat Hillary Clinton would be released during the 2016 campaign — a claim the president has denied — and accused Trump of lying during the 2016 campaign about the Moscow deal.
And he said he was left with the unmistakable impression Trump wanted him to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate project, though the president never directly told him so.
Cohen also said Trump directed him to arrange a hush money payment to a porn actress who said she had sex with the president a decade earlier. He said the president arranged to reimburse Cohen, and Cohen brought to the hearing a check that he said was proof of the transaction.
On Wednesday, Cohen had named Trump Organization CFO Alan Weisselberg as being privy to many of these transactions. On Thursday, a House intelligence committee aide said that the panel anticipates bringing in Weisselberg for an interview but did not name a date for when that might happen.
Cohen also took aim at a fellow personal lawyer for Trump. He said attorney Jay Sekulow previewed Cohen’s testimony before his appearance on the Hill in 2017 regarding plans to build a Trump building in Moscow.
Sekulow, counsel to the president, said in a statement, “Testimony by Michael Cohen that attorneys for the president edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false.”
Cohen’s testimony unfolded as Trump was in Vietnam meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Saying he tried to watch as much of the marathon hearing as he could, Trump told reporters Thursday in Vietnam that Cohen “lied a lot” in his depiction of the president as a racist and con artist and assailed House Democrats for holding the hearing as he was abroad.
“Having a fake hearing like that and having it in the middle of a very important summit like this is sort of incredible,” Trump said during a news conference in Hanoi, after his talks with Kim ended without an agreement.
He seized on Cohen’s concession that he had no direct evidence that Trump or his aides colluded with Russia to get him elected, the primary question of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Trump said he was a “little impressed” that Cohen had said that to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
But the tantalizing clues that Cohen offered about ongoing investigations that appear to involve Trump and his associates loom ominously.
Cohen’s disclosure that he’s cooperating with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York on matters he said he couldn’t discuss publicly spurred a tweet from Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and U.S. prosecutor: “The words that he said today that would send a chill up my spine at the White House would be, ‘I am in constant contact with the Southern District.’ ”
Pressure on top figures in Trump’s business could force them and others to cooperate in hopes of gaining leniency, much as some pivotal figures from Trump’s campaign, including Michael Flynn and Rick Gates, ultimately agreed to assist investigators.