Trump: Cohen broke law, not me
President places blame entirely on lawyer for felonies
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump denied Thursday that he had directed his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to break the law during the 2016 campaign by buying the silence of women who claimed they once had affairs with the future president.
But in morning tweets, Trump did not dispute that he had directed Cohen to make the payments, as Cohen and federal prosecutors have alleged — actions that could imperil Trump.
The president claimed that Cohen bore responsibility for any criminal violations of campaign finance law related to the payments to former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal and adultfilm star Stormy Daniels.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law,” Trump wrote in Twitter statements. “He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”
In these and other statements Thursday, Trump tried to place blame entirely on his lawyer for felonies that his advisers and allies are increasingly concerned could imperil the president.
The statements come as Trump feels besieged by multiplying investigations in New York and Washington and uncertain about what may be around the corner, according to several of his associates.
“What’s happened so far is not good, and it could get worse,” said a former senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly.
In reference to the Cohen case, this person added: “Are they crimes? Yes. Is that a bad look if the president is directly tied to it and could under normal circumstances be criminally prosecuted? Yes. And no, that’s not a good thing.”
Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for what U.S. District Judge William Pauley called a “veritable smorgasbord of criminal conduct” — crimes that included tax violations and lying to a bank as well as those related to the hushmoney payments.
Cohen told Pauley that his weakness was “a blind loyalty to Donald Trump” and a failure to refuse the then-candidate’s demands.
“Time and time again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass,” Cohen said in court.
The developments have shaken people in Trump’s orbit. White House staffers say they feel uneasy and nervous about what might come next, while Trump is publicly revealing a sense of betrayal that his longtime lawyer implicated him in crimes.
Trump is worried about the intensifying state of not only the hush-money investigation by the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, but also of the Russia probe by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to people with knowledge of the president’s private discussions.
The Wall Street Journal also reported Thursday that federal prosecutors in Manhattan have opened another investigative front by probing whether Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised from donations.
“He’s never been in a position where he can’t shuck and jive and work his way out of things,” said one Republican who works closely with the White House. “Well, it’s all coming home to roost.”
Trump resisted commenting Wednesday on Cohen’s prison sentence, ignoring questions shouted by reporters about whether his former fixer had worked t o cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds.”
But on Thursday morning, Trump weighed in on Twitter for the first time. He claimed that he did “nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws.”
Then he asserted that Cohen “probably was not guilty” of even civil violations related to the payments to McDougal and Daniels — a view at odds with the view of many lawyers.
Lastly, Trump argued that Cohen agreed to charges “in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did — including the fact that his family was temporarily let off the hook.”
Trump echoed those tweets in a television interview recorded later Thursday. Sitting down with Fox News Channel anchor Harris Faulkner in the West Wing of the White House, Trump said of his interactions with Cohen, “I never directed him to do anything wrong.”
In retrospect, the president told Faulkner, hiring Cohen was a mistake.
The latest developments have exposed the depth of Trump’s efforts to deceive the public about the illegal hush-money payments, and some of his friends and advisers said privately that they fear those efforts could imperil the president.
While there is a consensus view inside the White House that a sitting president will not be indicted, the former senior administration official described a deep uncertainty about other ways that Trump could be held liable.
And there is growing anxiety among Trump’s allies, including in Congress, that he could be vulnerable to the various investigations and, eventually, Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.