Ducks for legal cover...

Trump ducks for legal cover after Cohen sentencing

The president claims he never directed his ex-lawyer to break the law and questions whether any campaign finance violations even occurred.

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO, JOSH GERSTEIN and DARREN SAMUELSOHN

President Donald Trump on Thursday ended his silence on Michael Cohen's prison sentencing, claiming he never directed his longtime attorney to break the law and that he bears no responsibility for Cohen's campaign finance violations.

In his first tweets since Cohen was sentenced to three years for a series of tax fraud and lying charges on Wednesday, Trump argued that Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws to get a lighter sentence. The president also questioned whether any legal violations even occurred.

“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. 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," Trump wrote on Twitter across a flurry of posts Thursday morning. "Despite that many campaign finance lawyers have strongly stated that I did nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws, if they even apply, because this was not campaign finance."

"Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me, but he plead to two campaign charges which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty even on a civil basis," the president continued. "Those charges were just agreed to by him 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. As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me!”

Trump appeared on Fox News later on Thursday and made many of the same points, claiming prosecutors added the campaign finance charges to Cohen's case to "embarrass me."

"I never directed him to do anything incorrect or wrong," Trump said.

Cohen pleaded guilty in August to violating campaign finance law when he made hush-money payments ahead of the 2016 election to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and helped arrange a similar payoff to Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom claimed they had affairs with Trump.

Trump’s ex-lawyer stated that he made these arrangements at the direction of then-candidate Trump and that they were intended to sway the election.

The president first denied advance knowledge of the payments but has since shifted his position to state that even if he was aware of the payments, they had nothing to do with the election.

Trump’s prior claims that the payments were not intended to sway the election conflict with Cohen’s statements as well as a non-prosecution deal between federal prosecutors and American Media Inc., the publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, which coordinated the hush-money payment to McDougal.

On Thursday, Trump appeared to argue that he relied on Cohen to know the statutes and that he himself lacked the necessary criminal intent to violate any campaign finance laws.

Generally, federal prosecutors seeking to prove a criminal campaign finance case must show a “knowing and willful” attempt to flout the statute. There has been no public indication that Cohen ever explicitly discussed with Trump the idea that the payments could be illegal.

Asked Thursday whether Cohen ever told Trump that the arrangements were unlawful, Cohen adviser Lanny Davis said he wasn’t sure.

“I don't know what his advice was to Mr. Trump,” Davis said. Davis maintained that Trump knew secrecy was part of the plan and that a recording Cohen made of Trump indicates Trump wanted one of the payments made in “cash.” Trump’s attorneys have disputed that interpretation.

Former Clinton and Obama Justice Department official Neal Katyal said Trump’s claims about what he did or didn’t discuss with Cohen are essentially worthless.

“Reminder: 100 percent lied when he said in April he ‘did not know about the 130k payment to Stormy Daniels’ — why should we believe him now?” Katyal wrote on Twitter.

Some legal experts have also questioned whether payments to suppress evidence of an affair could be considered campaign donations under federal law. Federal Election Commission rules forbid spending campaign funds on “personal” expenses.

The last time federal prosecutors charged a high-profile political figure with campaign finance law violations related to attempts to cover up an extramarital affair, the case foundered and was eventually dropped.

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was indicted in 2011 on charges that he facilitated nearly $1 million in payments to Rielle Hunter, a videographer with whom the candidate secretly had an affair during his 2008 presidential campaign. The money from two wealthy Edwards supporters was used to pay for medical, travel and living expenses for Hunter, who became pregnant and delivered the child just after the campaign ended.

Edwards’ legal defense — headed by Abbe Lowell, now an attorney for Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — included many of the same points made by Trump and his allies. However, it was harder for Edwards to plead unfamiliarity with the ins and outs of campaign finance law since he is a trial lawyer who ran several campaigns for federal office.

A federal jury in Greensboro, N.C., heard the case in 2012, acquitting Edwards on one charge and deadlocking on five others. The Justice Department did not pursue a retrial.

The outcome of the Edwards case clearly demonstrates the risk prosecutors take in bringing such charges. On the other hand, the Justice Department did authorize the indictment on such a theory and has never repudiated it. Some lawyers think that means prosecutors would seek to do so again in Trump’s case.

Whether such a case should be brought may be a largely academic question for the moment, though, because a Justice Department legal opinion from 2000 and an earlier one from 1973 say the president should not be indicted or tried while in office, leaving impeachment as the only apparent remedy. DOJ could overrule those opinions, but there’s been no indication it plans to do so.

Trump’s broadsides against Cohen, a longtime attack dog for the president who once said he would take a bullet for Trump, have been particularly scathing in the aftermath of the announcement that he would cooperate with investigators from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

In remarks at his sentencing hearing, Cohen was unsparing toward his former boss. Responding to previous claims by Trump that he was “weak,” Cohen countered that his only weakness was “blind loyalty” to the president.

Despite the near certainty he would have to serve jail time, Cohen told the judge that his sentencing date ironically would be the day he was getting his freedom “back.”

“I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the fateful day that I accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen I truly admired,” he said.

And on Thursday, Cohen wasn’t the only Trump associate on the president’s mind. He also used the case of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn to claim that Mueller is coercing people into lying about their activities.

“They gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated - the FBI said he didn’t lie and they overrode the FBI,” Trump tweeted later Thursday morning. “They want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. Sad!”

Attorneys for Flynn, who pleaded guilty last December to lying to the FBI during the early stages of its Russia probe, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to spare him any jail time because of his “extensive cooperation” with Mueller.

But Flynn’s lawyers also came close to suggesting that the misstatements at the center of his guilty plea might have been inadvertent and the result of the way his initial FBI interview arose just a few days after the inauguration and well before there was a publicly acknowledged investigation into Russian interference.

House Republicans earlier this year wrote in a report that FBI agents initially did not believe Flynn lied to them about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador during the transition. But last week, former FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers that agents had concluded Flynn was “obviously lying” to them, even though he didn’t show any of the common physical traits of deception, such as sweating or hesitating to answer.

On Thursday, Trump quickly followed up his tweet about Flynn — his first about his former adviser since April — with a familiar message: “WITCH HUNT!”