President’s fixer ‘rigged opinion polls to make boss look good’

MICHAEL COHEN, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, reportedly paid a tech expert to rig opinion polls in his boss’s favour and to create a Twitter profile that praised Mr Cohen as a “sex symbol”.

He paid the expert to boost Mr Trump’s standing in two online polls, one on America’s top business leaders and another on potential 2016 presidential candidates, The Wall Street

Journal reported.

Cohen also, bizarrely, asked for a Twitter account called “Women For Cohen” to be set up, which posted positive comments about him and his looks, according to the article. He allegedly agreed to pay $50,000 (£38,500) for the work, but in the end handed over between $12,000 and $13,000, along with a boxing glove worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter.

Responding on Twitter, Cohen did not dispute the report, writing: “What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of Donald Trump. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it.”

However, Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s lawyer, disputed that claim, saying: “This is not true. The president did not know about this if it happened.”

Cohen, 52, once pledged to “take a bullet” for Mr Trump but flipped after pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and fraud. He was sentenced to three years in prison and is set to begin serving that term in March.

The man said to have been employed for the work was John Gauger, chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia. The pair met shortly after Mr Trump gave a speech at the university, according to the newspaper.

‘What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of Donald Trump. I truly regret my blind loyalty’