US President Donald Trump accused his former lawyer Michael Cohen of lying under pressure of prosecution as the White House grappled with allegations that the president orchestrated a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of two women who claimed that he had had affairs with them.
Confronting mounting legal and political threats, Trump on Wednesday said on Twitter that Cohen made up “stories in order to get a ‘deal’” from federal prosecutors.
Cohen on Tuesday pleaded guilty 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.
However, the White House signaled no clear strategy for managing the fallout.
At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at least seven times that Trump has done nothing wrong and is 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 TV news and it was not clear that the White House was assembling any kind of coordinated response.
Trump himself publicly denied wrongdoing, sitting down with his favored program Fox and Friends for an interview that was to air yesterday.
In the interview, he incorrectly said that the hush-money payouts were not “even a campaign violation,” because he subsequently personally reimbursed Cohen for the payments instead of using campaign funds.
Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires that transactions are disclosed.
Cohen on Tuesday said that 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 has said she had with Trump.
The White House denied that the president lied, with Sanders calling the assertion “ridiculous,” but not offering an 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 almost simultaneous announcements on Tuesday of the Cohen plea deal and the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges.
Manafort is to face trial next month on separate charges in Washington that include acting as a foreign agent.
That Cohen was in trouble was no surprise — federal prosecutors raided his offices months ago — but 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 US special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating alleged Russian attempts to sway voters in the 2016 election.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS