Created web of lies...

Michael Cohen alleges Trump created web of lies

The president's former lawyer and fixer accuses Trump of involvement in criminal conduct.

By ANDREW DESIDERIO and DARREN SAMUELSOHN

President Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer on Wednesday laid out a series of damning accusations against the president, presenting evidence of alleged lies and criminal conduct and expressing remorse over his decade of service to a man he described as unstable and racist.

Michael Cohen testified to the House Oversight Committee that Trump directed him to lie about the president’s knowledge of hush-money payments, that Trump was informed about plans to dump Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign and was kept in the loop about a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The explosive comments from Cohen during a sharply partisan House hearing contradict Trump’s previous claims and expose Trump and some of his closest advisers to new legal and political trouble, potentially including impeachment, as Democrats used the hearing to draw out evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

Cohen sought redemption by revealing what he said is the true character of the commander in chief and apologizing to lawmakers for lying to them in previous testimony. In stunning daylong testimony, Cohen became the highest-profile witness to testify against a sitting president since former White House counsel John Dean took the stand against President Richard Nixon.

“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said Wednesday in his opening statement. “He is a racist, he is a conman, and he is a cheat.”

Perhaps most important for the president’s critics, Cohen turned over a trove of documents to Congress that showed Trump’s personal net worth and Trump’s reimbursements for a hush-money payment and other pieces of evidence that could endanger the president.

One of the documents, titled “Donald J. Trump Summary of Net Worth As of March 31, 2013,” shows Trump with a net worth of approximately $8.6 billion. Cohen also provided the committee with copies of a $35,000 check signed by Trump from his personal bank account — while he was president in 2017 — as one part of a reimbursement to Cohen for the $130,000 payment to buy the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleges that she and Trump had an affair.

Cohen told lawmakers that the documents he provided to the House panel prove that Trump engaged in illicit acts and painted a misleading picture of his personal wealth in order to secure loans from Deutsche Bank and ensure that he would be listed on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people.

“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen said, later adding: “Everything was done with the knowledge and direction of Mr. Trump.”

Cohen — who is scheduled to report to federal prison in May after pleading guilty to lying to Congress and for campaign-finance crimes related to the hush-money payment — expressed remorse for working for more than a decade as the president’s fixer.

And he warned Republicans who continue to defend Trump that they, too, could end up like him.

Cohen told lawmakers that Trump directed him to lie about the president’s knowledge of the hush-money payments — including to first lady Melania Trump. The president has repeatedly claimed he had no knowledge of the payoff to Daniels.

Cohen implicated Trump’s family members and longtime business associates, too.

In his opening statement, Cohen charged that the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, had also signed checks reimbursing him for the hush-money payments.

He also said he briefed Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump about the progress of the Trump Organization’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the timing of the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and said he misled lawmakers in order to shield Trump from further legal trouble.

Initially, Democrats had signaled Cohen’s testimony would not cover topics directly under the purview of special counsel Robert Mueller and his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In his opening remarks, however, Cohen discussed the federal investigations that have ensnared him.

Cohen said he was aware of other allegedly criminal acts by the president but said he could not discuss them due to the ongoing federal investigations, indicating that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were still investigating Trump.

Cohen said he has maintained “constant contact” with federal prosecutors in New York about several ongoing investigations, including probes into Trump. He also said the U.S. attorney’s office instructed him not to answer questions about what he discussed the last time he communicated with the president or people acting on his behalf.

In one bombshell disclosure, Cohen contradicted the president’s written testimony last year to the special counsel by recounting a conversation he overhead in Trump’s office in Trump Tower in July 2016, when longtime Trump associate Roger Stone was put on speakerphone to report back what he’d just discussed with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder.

During that call, Stone reported that Assange had told him “within a couple days there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Cohen said.

“Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect, ‘Wouldn’t that be great,’” Cohen testified. In a statement, WikiLeaks said Assange “has never had a telephone call with Roger Stone.” In an email to POLITICO, Stone dismissed the testimony that referenced him.

“Mr. Cohen’s statement is not true,” wrote Stone, who was charged last month in the Mueller probe for lying to Congress and obstructing lawmakers’ Russia investigation.

Democrats scrutinized Cohen’s claims about Trump’s conversations with Stone. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who chaired the Democratic National Committee at the time of the WikiLeaks email hacks, asked Cohen about Stone’s role as a longtime Trump confidant and brief adviser to the Trump campaign.

“He frequently reached out to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump was very happy to take his calls,” Cohen said, adding that Trump’s “desire to win would have him work with anyone.”

Cohen also offered new details about Trump’s apparent knowledge of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who offered dirt on Clinton to Trump Jr. and other senior campaign officials. He said he was in a room with Trump early that month “when something peculiar happened,” noting the president’s son came into the room and walked behind his father’s desk. He recalled hearing Trump Jr. tell his father in a low voice, “The meeting is all set.”

“I remember, Mr. Trump saying, ‘OK, good, let me know,” Cohen testified, adding that Trump had told him and others “that Don Jr. would never set up any meeting of significance alone and certainly not without checking with his father.”

Ahead of planned testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, Cohen told lawmakers he did not have direct evidence of collusion between Trump or his campaign and Russia.

A lawyer for Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the president’s oldest son live-tweeted the hearing. “This sounds like a breakup letter … and I’m keeping your sweatshirt,” Trump Jr. wrote in a post as Cohen delivered his opening statement.

Mueller’s spokesman declined to comment when asked about Cohen’s testimony and whether the special counsel’s office had a chance to review it. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, with which Cohen negotiated a guilty plea, also declined to comment.

Trump’s 2020 campaign issued a statement calling Cohen “a felon, a disbarred lawyer, and a convicted perjurer” — as part of broader GOP efforts to discredit his testimony. “Why did they even bother to swear him in this time?” said Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign’s national press secretary.

Republicans largely used the hearing to portray Cohen as an untrustworthy witness who sought to advance himself rather than protect the president. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the committee’s top Republican, suggested that Cohen was positioning himself for a job in the White House, while Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) called Cohen a “pathological liar.”

Another Republican, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, asked Cohen whether he would commit to not pursue a book or movie deal, work for a TV network or run for political office. Cohen responded that he would not make such a commitment.

As they sought to undercut Cohen’s credibility, Republicans seized on the notion that Cohen’s appearance could be a way for him to get additional recommendations from federal prosecutors to reduce his upcoming three-year prison sentence. Cohen disputed that notion.

“I wish it was, but it’s not,” he said.