Cohen to give more testimony in private
President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was due to talk behind closed doors on Thursday to a congressional panel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, capping an explosive week of testimony in which he made new allegations of wrongdoing by Trump.
In his third and final Capitol Hill session this week, Cohen was due to testify to the House intelligence committee, which has been probing Russian election meddling and any collusion with the Trump campaign.
It follows dramatic public testimony by Cohen on Wednesday before the House oversight committee, in which the one-time “fixer” for Trump accused the president of breaking the law while in office and said for the first time that Trump knew in advance about a WikiLeaks dump of stolen e-mails that hurt his 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton.
As he did before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, Cohen is expected to apologise for lying to Congress in 2017. That was when he submitted a statement saying efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow had ceased by January 2016. In fact, the talks stretched to June 2016. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for that lie and other crimes.
Democratic House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said in a tweet on Wednesday he planned to dig into the Trump Moscow project, the revelations about Wikileaks and any White House role in Cohen’s earlier false statements.
“Today Cohen provided the American public with a firsthand account of serious misconduct by Trump & those around him,” Schiff tweeted. “Tomorrow we’ll examine in depth many of those topics.”
At Wednesday’s hearing Cohen said Trump never explicitly told him to lie to Congress about the Moscow skyscraper negotiations. But Cohen said he believed he was following implicit directions to minimise their efforts on the tower.
Cohen told the House oversight committee he had no direct evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with Moscow during the election campaign, but that he had suspicions that something untoward had occurred.
Possible collusion is a key theme of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which has dogged the president during his first two years in office. Trump has repeatedly denied the allegation, as has the Kremlin.