Trump accuses Cohen of lying to ‘get a deal’ from prosecutors
President argues, incorrectly, that payouts would not be a campaign finance violation
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump accused his former lawyer Michael Cohen of lying under pressure of prosecution Wednesday as his White House grappled with allegations that the president had orchestrated a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of two women who claimed he had affairs with them.
Confronting mounting legal and political threats, Mr. Trump took to Twitterto accuse Mr. Cohen of making up “stories in order to get a ‘deal’” from federal prosecutors. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight charges, including campaignfinance violations that he said he carried out in coordination with Mr. Trump. Behind closed doors, Mr. Trump expressed worry and frustration that a man intimately familiar with his political, personal andbusiness dealings for more than adecade had turned on him.
Yet his White House signaled no clear strategy for managing the fallout. At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at least seven times that Mr. Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges. She referred substantive questions to the president’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland. Outside allies of the White House said they had received little
guidance on how to respond to the events in their appearances on cable news. And it was not clear the West Wing was assembling any kind of coordinated response.
Mr. Trump himself publicly denied wrongdoing, sitting down with his favored program “Fox & Friends” for an interview set to air Thursday. In the interview, he argued, incorrectly, that the hush-money payouts weren’t “even a campaign violation” because he subsequently reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payments personally instead of with campaign funds. Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
Mr. Cohen had said Tuesday he secretly used shell companies to make payments used to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump has insisted that he only found out about the payments after they were made, despite the release of a September 2016 taped conversation in which Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen can be heard discussing a deal to pay Ms. McDougal for her story of a 2006 affair she says she had with Mr. Trump.
The White House denied the president had lied, with Ms. Sanders calling the assertion “ridiculous.” Yet she offered no explanation for Mr. Trump’s shifting accounts.
As Mr. Trump vented his frustration, White House aides sought to project a sense of calm. Used to the ever-present shadow of federal investigations, numbed West Wing staffers absorbed near-simultaneous announcements Tuesday of the Cohen plea deal and the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges.
Mr. Manafort faces trial on separate charges in September in the District of Columbia that include acting as a foreign agent.
That Mr. Cohen was in trouble was no surprise — federal prosecutors raided his offices months ago — but Mr. Trump and his allies were caught off-guard when he also pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes, which, for the first time, took the swirling criminal probes directly to the president.
Both cases resulted, at least in part, from the work of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s attempts to sway voters in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump yet again denounced the probe Wednesday as a “witch hunt.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said Wednesday that Mr. Cohen has information “that would be of interest” to the special counsel. “There are subjects that Michael Cohen could address that would be of interest to the special counsel,” Mr. Davis said in television interviews. Mr. Davis also said Mr. Cohen is not looking for a presidential pardon.
Mr. Trump, in turn, praised Mr. Manafort as “a brave man!” raising speculation the former campaign operative could become the recipient of a pardon. Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump wrote, had “tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break.’” Ms. Sanders said the matter of a pardon for Mr. Manafort had not been discussed.
Among Trump allies, the back-to-back blows were a harbinger of dark days to come for the president. Democrats are anticipating gaining subpoena power over the White House — and many are openly discussing the possibility of impeaching Mr. Trump — should they retake control of the House in November’s midterm elections. And even Trump loyalists acknowledged the judicial proceedings were a blow to the GOP’s chances of retaining the majority this year.
“They have survived the Russia thing, but no one knows what’s next,” said former campaign aide Barry Bennett.
Debate swirled inside and outside the White House about next steps and how damaging the legal fallout was for the president. Some Democrats expressed fears Wednesday about the politically risky step of impeachment. Allies of the president stressed an untested legal theory that a sitting president cannot be indicted — only impeached.
Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer stressed that the revelations may be sordid but do not meet the constitutional bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“Having an affair and lying about it with a porn star and a Playboy bunny is not impeachable,” Mr. Fleischer said, “it’s Donald Trump.”