Shared from the 2/28/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

Cohen accuses Trump of lies, criminality

President’s former lawyer offers damaging insight into campaign, business dealings

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J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press

Michael Cohen detailed a decade of working for Donald Trump in testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

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Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, center, assailed Michael Cohen’s character and reasons for testifying against his former boss, President Donald Trump, calling Cohen a “fraudster, cheat, felon and, in two months, a federal inmate.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer accused him on Wednesday of an expansive pattern of lies and criminality, offering a damning portrayal of life inside the president’s orbit where he said advisers sacrificed integrity for proximity to power.

Michael Cohen, who represented Trump for a decade, told Congress that the president lied to the American public about business interests in Russia during the 2016 campaign and lied to reporters about stolen Democratic emails. Trump also told Cohen to lie about illegal hush payments to cover up alleged sexual indiscretions, the lawyer charged.

The allegations, aired at a daylong hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, exposed a dark underside of Trump’s business and political worlds in the voice of one of the ultimate insiders. Perhaps no close associate of a president has turned on him in front of Congress in such dramatic fashion since John Dean testified against President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

“He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat,” Cohen said of the president. Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to lying under oath to Congress, among other crimes, said he did so to protect Trump. “I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore,” he said.

“He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat. I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore.”

But it remained unclear whether his testimony would change the political dynamics of a series of scandals that have already polarized Washington and the country and that could lead to an impeachment battle later this year.

Assailing Cohen as a proven liar, Republicans denounced the hearing as a “charade” and an “embarrassment for our country.” Democrats said Republicans “ran away from the truth” as they sought to defend a corrupt president who has employed “textbook mob tactics.”

GOP challenges

As with so many other moments of the Trump era, the hearing seemed to be as much about partisan theater as fact-finding, with the two sides fixed in their views and unbending in their approach. Democrats and Republicans set forth their own conflicting narratives about the man who once served Trump, either as a dissembling disgruntled former employee trying to reduce his sentence or a fallen sinner who has realized his mistakes and is now trying to redeem himself by coming clean.

Through it all sat Cohen, 52, with dark circles under his eyes, as he awaits a three-year prison term that begins this spring. Apologizing repeatedly to his family, Cohen described his 10 years working for Trump as a trip into a world of deceit in which the now-disbarred lawyer ignored his own conscience in order to get close to a magnetic person of power.

The president’s re-election campaign organization dismissed Cohen as a convicted perjurer who should not be believed. “This is the same Michael Cohen who has admitted that he lied to Congress previously,” Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement. “Why did they even bother to swear him in this time?”

Late Wednesday after Cohen’s testimony, Trump’s inaugural committee was subpoenaed for financial records by the attorney general for the District of Columbia.

A spokesman for the committee confirmed the subpoena late Wednesday and said committee officials are in contact with investigators.

The committee has received two similar subpoenas from federal prosecutors in New York and state authorities in New Jersey.

Republicans on the committee aggressively challenged Cohen along the same lines. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican, called Cohen a “fraudster, cheat, felon and, in two months, a federal inmate.”

The hearing drew enormous interest on Capitol Hill, where Democrats just last month took control of the House and are under enormous pressure from their liberal base to impeach Trump. The crowds were huge and the sense of drama palpable. Lawmakers sat rapt during Cohen’s 30-minute opening statement as he outlined his accusations.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who threatened to reveal what he said were Cohen’s extramarital affairs on Twitter on Tuesday, showed up for the hearing, although he is not on the committee.

Campaign machinations

Cohen laid out a series of actions by Trump that bolster previous allegations and presented documents to corroborate his account, including copies of checks issued by the president or his trust that he said were reimbursements for $130,000 in hush payments Cohen made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress who alleged an affair with Trump.

Cohen said that Trump, as a candidate, initiated the hush payment plan and, while president, arranged for 11 checks reimbursing the lawyer “as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” a crime to which Cohen has pleaded guilty.

After news reports about the payments in February 2018, Cohen told lawmakers, the president called him to discuss what the lawyer should say publicly about the scheme. Trump told him to say that the president “was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he wasn’t knowledgeable of” Cohen’s actions.

Cohen said he had no “direct evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.” But, he added, “I have my suspicions.”

He pointed to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s eldest son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman; met with Russians after being told that they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

The president has denied knowing about the meeting at the time, but Cohen cast doubt on that, saying he was in Trump’s office one day in June 2016 when Donald Jr. came in, went behind his father’s desk and, speaking in a low voice, said, “The meeting is all set.” The candidate, he said, replied, “OK, good. Let me know.”

Cohen also recalled being in Trump’s office shortly before the Democratic National Convention in 2016 when Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser, called. Trump put him on speakerphone and Stone reported that he had just spoken with Julian Assange, the founder of Wiki-Leaks, who said “that within a couple of days there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

“Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of, ‘Wouldn’t that be great?’” Cohen said.

‘Marketing opportunity’

Cohen compared Trump to a mobster who inflated his net worth, rigged an art auction, frequently used racist language and threatened anyone who got in his way.

He provided several documents to the committee, including financial statements that Trump gave to institutions such as Deutsche Bank. He said that the president inflated or deflated his assets when it served his purposes. He also offered letters he wrote at Trump’s direction to the president’s high school and colleges threatening them not to release his grades.

Cohen said Trump did not run for president to make the country great, calling it the “greatest infomercial in political history” for his business. “He never expected to win the primary,” he said. “He never expected to win the general election. The campaign, for him, was always a marketing opportunity.”

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