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.
The Venezuelan government on Monday said that it would close its embassies in Norway and Australia, and open new ones in Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe in a restructuring of its foreign service, after weeks of growing tensions with the US. The closures are part of the “strategic reassignation of resources,” Venezueland President Nicolas Maduro’s government said in a statement, adding that consular services to Venezuelans in Norway and Australia would be provided by diplomatic missions, with details to be shared in the coming days. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had received notice of the embassy closure, but no
A missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
EXTRADITION FEARS: The legislative changes come five years after a treaty was suspended in response to the territory’s crackdown on democracy advocates Exiled Hong Kong dissidents said they fear UK government plans to restart some extraditions with the territory could put them in greater danger, adding that Hong Kong authorities would use any pretext to pursue them. An amendment to UK extradition laws was passed on Tuesday. It came more than five years after the UK and several other countries suspended extradition treaties with Hong Kong in response to a government crackdown on the democracy movement and its imposition of a National Security Law. The British Home Office said that the suspension of the treaty made all extraditions with Hong Kong impossible “even if
Former Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama, best known for making a statement apologizing over World War II, died yesterday aged 101, officials said. Murayama in 1995 expressed “deep remorse” over the country’s atrocities in Asia. The statement became a benchmark for Tokyo’s subsequent apologies over World War II. “Tomiichi Murayama, the father of Japanese politics, passed away today at 11:28am at a hospital in Oita City at the age of 101,” Social Democratic Party Chairwoman Mizuho Fukushima said. Party Secretary-General Hiroyuki Takano said he had been informed that the former prime minister died of old age. In the landmark statement in August 1995, Murayama said
RSS