In a damning depiction of US President Donald Trump, his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Wednesday cast him as a racist and a con man who used his inner circle to cover up politically damaging allegations about sex and lied throughout the 2016 US presidential election campaign about his business interests in Russia.
Cohen, who previously pleaded guilty to lying to the US Congress, told the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform that Trump had advance knowledge and embraced the news that e-mails damaging to former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton would be released during the campaign.
However, he also said that he had no “direct evidence” that Trump or his aides colluded with Russia to get him elected, the primary question of US Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Cohen, shaking off incessant criticism from Republicans anxious to paint him as a felon and liar, became the first Trump insider to pull back the curtain on a version of the inner workings of Trump’s political and business operations.
He likened the president to a “mobster” who demanded blind loyalty from underlings and expected them to lie on his behalf to conceal information and protect him — even if it meant breaking the law.
“I am not protecting Mr Trump anymore,” Cohen said.
At a Vietnamese hotel and unable to ignore the drama thousands of kilometers away, Trump lashed out on Twitter, saying that Cohen “did bad things unrelated to Trump” and “is lying in order to reduce his prison time.”
Cohen said that he arranged hush money payments to women on Trump’s behalf, and lied about them to the public and the first lady at the president’s behest.
He agreed to say that Trump was “not knowledgeable” about the transactions, even though Trump directly reimbursed him, and said that he was left with the unmistakable impression that Trump wanted him to lie to Congress about a Moscow real-estate project, even Trump never directly told him so.
In one revelation, Cohen said that prosecutors in New York were investigating conversations that Trump or his advisers had with him after his office and hotel room were raided by the FBI in April last year.
Cohen said that he could not discuss that conversation because it remains under investigation.
The appearance marked the latest step in Cohen’s evolution from legal fixer for Trump to a foe who has implicated him in federal campaign finance violations.
The hearing proceeded along parallel tracks, with Democrats focusing on allegations against Trump, while Republicans sought to undermine Cohen’s credibility and the proceeding itself.
As Republicans blasted him as a convicted liar, a mostly unrattled Cohen sought to blunt the attacks by repeatedly acknowledging his own failings.
He called himself a “fool,” warned lawmakers of the perils of blind loyalty to a leader undeserving of it and pronounced himself ashamed of what he had done to protect Trump.
“You make mistakes in life and I’ve owned them and I’ve taken responsibility for them, and I’m paying a huge price, as is my family,” Cohen said during testimony that spanned about seven hours.
Cohen is soon to report to prison for a three-year sentence.
At the same time, he is seen as a vital witness for US federal prosecutors, because of his proximity to Trump during key episodes under investigation and their decade-long professional relationship.
Cohen gave lawmakers a first-person account of how he allegedly arranged to buy the silence of a porn actress and a Playboy model who said that they had sex with Trump.
He said that during a February 2017 conversation with Trump in the White House, Trump told him that reimbursement checks sent through FedEx were coming, but would take some time to get through the White House system.
Trump called him a year later to discuss the public messaging around the payments and once even put his wife, Melania, on the phone so that he could disavow knowledge, Cohen said.
He said he was presenting the committee with a copy of a check Trump wrote from his personal bank account after he became president to reimburse Cohen for the hush money payments.
In an allegation relating to the probe, Cohen said that he overheard Trump confidant Roger Stone telling Trump in the summer of 2016 that WikiLeaks would dump damaging information about Clinton.
Trump put Stone on speakerphone and Stone told him that he had communicated with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and that “within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of e-mails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Cohen said.
Damaging e-mails that US officials have said were hacked by Russia were later released by WikiLeaks.
Trump responded by saying “wouldn’t that be great,” Cohen said.
Stone on Wednesday disputed that account.
Cohen also suggested that Trump implicitly told him to lie about a Moscow real-estate project.
Cohen has said he lied about the project, which he said Trump knew about, as Cohen was negotiating with Russia during the campaign.
He added that Trump did not directly tell him to lie, but “he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing.”
Cohen said that he did not have direct evidence that Trump colluded with the Kremlin during the election, but that he had “suspicions,” including after a June 2016 meeting between Trump’s oldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘colluding.’ Was there something odd about the back-and-forth praise with President Putin?” Cohen said. “Yes, but I’m not really sure I can answer the question about collusion.”
Cohen was scheduled to talk behind closed doors yesterday to House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which has been probing Russian election meddling and any collusion with the Trump campaign.
It was to be his third and final Capitol Hill session this week.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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