With White House stung by Cohen accusation, Trump fires back
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, Trump took to Twitter to accuse Cohen of making up "stories in order to get a 'deal'" from federal prosecutors. Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight charges, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in coordination with Trump. Behind closed doors, Trump expressed worry and frustration that a man intimately familiar with his political, personal and business dealings for more than a decade 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 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.
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 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. 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.
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 Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing a deal to pay Mcdougal for her story of a 2006 affair she says she had with Trump.
The White House denied the president had lied, with Sanders calling the assertion "ridiculous." Yet she offered no explanation for Trump's shifting accounts.
As 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.