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Cohen addresses lies from 2017
President Trump’s former lawyer turned over documents related to a real estate project in Moscow.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen has given the House intelligence committee documents purportedly illustrating how the president’s lawyers edited Cohen’s congressional testimony in 2017, statements that Cohen has admitted were false, according to people familiar with the matter.
Lawmakers had requested that Cohen turn over the documents after his public testimony last week, when he alleged before a separate House panel that Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, had made a change to Cohen’s 2017 testimony about “the length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive.” Sekulow has denied Cohen’s assertion.
According to people familiar with the documents, the changes were plentiful. But one of these people said that the changes were not substantive and that there had been no direct changes made to Cohen’s original assertions about the timeline along which Trump pursued the real estate project in Russia. The timeline is significant because if Trump continued to pursue his Moscow tower project until at least June 2016 instead of January of that year, as Cohen originally told lawmakers, it means he did so after it was clear that he had won enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency.
The documents come as Cohen returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for his fourth interview in recent days with congressional panels seeking answers about hush-money payments, the lies he says he told to shield Trump’s alleged Russia contacts, and pardons.
Cohen spoke for a second time privately with the House intelligence committee, which first met with him last week, following another closed-door session with the Senate intelligence committee and a public hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
During the course of those interviews, both House and Senate investigators expressed a keen interest in the subject of pardons, which Cohen claims Trump’s representatives dangled before him, according to people familiar with the matter. But others familiar with the matter said it was Cohen’s lawyers who raised the pardon issue.
The dispute is the latest in a politically-charged controversy surrounding Cohen’s testimony and credibility.
Cohen will soon start a three-year prison term for lies he told to Congress in 2017.
GOP lawmakers have argued that Cohen’s past pattern of lying makes his current testimony suspect. In recent days, leading Republicans have also accused intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., of coaching Cohen through his testimony.
Earlier this week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., suggested as much on Fox News, asking whether Schiff tried to “tamper” or “direct” Cohen to answer certain questions in a certain way. On Wednesday, intelligence panel member Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, sent a letter to Cohen, asking him to disclose the number and nature of his contacts with Schiff, and saying that those contacts raised questions about “witness tampering, obstruction of justice, or collusion.”
A spokesman for Schiff characterized his pre-interview contacts with Cohen as “proffer sessions,” deeming them “completely appropriate.”