Tag: Michael Cohen

Cohen says Trump attorney told him to say Trump Tower talks ended earlier than they did

The House Intelligence Committee has released transcripts of its private interviews with Michael Cohen, revealing that he told lawmakers President Trump‘s attorney Jay Sekulow encouraged him to testify falsely to Congress in 2017 about the duration of discussions around building a Trump property in Moscow.

The committee interviewed Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer,” behind closed doors on February 28 and March 6 — before he reported to prison to serve a three-year sentence for bank fraud, campaign finance violations and other charges — as part of an investigation into the president’s business dealings in Russia and other foreign countries.

The interview focused heavily on Cohen’s previous false statement to Congress on discussions within the Trump Organization about building a Trump Tower in Moscow as well as other topics.

View the complete May 20 article by Morgan Chalfant, Olivia Beavers, Jacqueline Thomsen and Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Cohen told lawmakers Trump attorney Jay Sekulow encouraged him to falsely claim Moscow project ended in January 2016

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, told a House panel during closed-door hearings earlier this year that he had been encouraged by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow to falsely claim in a 2017 statement to Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, according to transcripts of his testimony released Monday evening.

In fact, Cohen later admitted, discussions on the Moscow tower continued into June of the presidential election year, after it was clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. Cohen is serving three years in prison for lying to Congress, financial crimes and campaign finance violations.

House Democrats are now scrutinizing whether Sekulow or other Trump attorneys played a role in shaping Cohen’s 2017 testimony to Congress. Cohen has said he made the false statement to help hide the fact that Trump had potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in a possible Russian project while he was running for president.

View the complete May 20 article by Tom Hamburger, Ellen Nakashima and Karoun Demirjian on The Washington Post website here.

Georgian Businessman Offers More Texts With Cohen to Rebut Mueller Footnote

A Georgian-American businessman is accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller of “glaring inaccuracies” and sensationalizing texts about alleged salacious tapes involving Donald Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, lawyers for Giorgi Rtskhiladze demanded a retraction to a footnote in Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The letter says the footnote includes only part of Rtskhiladze’s text exchange with then-Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, failing to provide the full context. The FBI and Mueller’s team “spliced the dialogue to produce the ugly insinuations and allegations of Footnote 112 to attract publicity — all while impugning Mr. Rtskhiladze’s character,” according to his attorney, A. Scott Bolden.

View the complete April 24 article by Sephanie Baker and Helena Bedwell on the Bloomberg News website here.

Here’s how Trump could lose the 2020 election – and still remain president

At the end of his congressional testimony in February, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, floated a nightmarish possibility.

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen said, “I fear that if he loses in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Cohen’s comments may seem hyperbolic, but they are worth taking seriously. In the aftermath of 2018, Trump told reporters, “Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes.” In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he would accept defeat. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he declared. Since that election, Trump has routinely said that his popular vote defeat was the product of “millions and millions” of illegal ballots. Now, facing potential legal jeopardy from ongoing investigations into hush-money payments and any number of apparent financial crimes, he might reasonably conclude that staying in office is the only way to avoid being indicted.

View the complete April 13 article by Daniel block on The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Prosecutors Seek Records on Cohen’s ‘Back Channel’ With Giuliani

Before he pleaded guilty and began assisting federal prosecutors last summer, Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former fixer, spoke with a lawyer who agreed to reach out to the president’s legal team on his behalf.

The lawyer, Robert J. Costello, had about a dozen conversations with Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, according to emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with people involved in the matter. In one email, the discussions were characterized as a “back channel of communication.”

During one of the conversations last April, Mr. Costello said in an interview, he asked whether Mr. Trump might put a pardon “on the table” for Mr. Cohen, who was under federal investigation for a variety of possible crimes, including arranging hush-money payments to two women who had said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani told Mr. Costello that the president was unwilling to discuss pardons at that time, Mr. Costello said in the interview, and they did not discuss it again.

View the complete March 13 article by Ben Protess, WIlliam K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

Michael Cohen suing Trump Organization for $1.9 million in legal fees

 

Michael Cohen is suing the Trump Organization for “failure to meet its indemnification obligations” by not paying his legal fees.

Details: The lawsuit claims that around July 2017, the Trump Organization and Cohen entered into an agreement under which the company would pay for Cohen’s representation and defense for various investigations. The organization confirmed its commitment to the deal through at least May 2018, even after Cohen came under heightened investigative scrutiny. In June 2018, shortly after Cohen began telling friends he was willing to cooperate with the Mueller investigation, the suit alleges the organization ceased to pay his law firm’s invoices “without notice or justification,” causing the firm to withdraw its representation of Cohen.

View the complete March 7 article by Zachary Basu on the Axios website here.

Trump: I did not break campaign finance laws

President Trump on Thursday doubled down on his assertion he did not break the law when he involved himself in a scheme to pay two women who alleged in the lead-up to the 2016 election that they had extramarital affairs with him.

“It was not a campaign contribution, and there were no violations of the campaign finance laws by me. Fake News!”  Trump tweeted.

The comments come after The New York Times reported Trump signed checks to reimburse his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, while he was serving as president.

Cohen Offers Documents in Bid to Show Trump Lawyers Helped With False Testimony Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, leaving the Capitol on Wednesday. Credit Erin Schaff/The New York Times Image

WASHINGTON — Michael D. Cohen on Wednesday provided new documents to the House Intelligence Committee that he said illustrated changes made at the request of President Trump’s lawyers to a knowingly false written statement that he delivered to Congress in 2017, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Cohen, in what was expected to be his last visit to Capitol Hill, brought multiple drafts of his 2017 statement along with emails with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about its drafting, hoping to back up claims that he made last week at an open hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. In that session, Mr. Cohen testified that there were “changes made, additions” to the original written statement, including about the length of negotiations over a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign.

It was not immediately clear how many changes were made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers, including Jay Sekulow, or how drastic those changes were. Two of the people familiar with the documents and Mr. Cohen’s testimony, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the closed-door session, said that at least some of the changes appeared to play down the knowledge of the president’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, about the project.

View the March 6 article by Nicholas Fandos and Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

Trump Tarnish On Republican Party Is Indelible

Credit: Spencer Platt, Getty Images

There were no big surprises from Michael Cohen’s recent testimony. Speaking under oath to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the former fixer to President Donald J. Trump called his longtime boss a “racist,” a “con man” and a “cheat.” But we already knew that, didn’t we?

Indeed, Cohen revealed little that had not been previously reported or even observed. The president’s long-standing practice of stiffing contractors who built his casinos and apartment buildings was the stuff of extensive news media reports before he was elected. And the last year has seen groundbreaking (and disturbing) reports of Trump’s attempts to get projects underway in Russia, which may explain his distressing habit of cozying up to strongman Vladimir Putin. Cohen revealed that Trump may also have committed insurance fraud, but given the president’s extensive record of lying and cheating, that’s hardly a surprise. News reports have already examined his family’s history of cheating on their taxes.

If anything surprised me, it was the depths to which so many Republicans were willing to sink in their efforts to defend a man who is obviously a liar, a cheat and a con man. In his opening statement, Cohen said, “I am ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty — of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him.” How many Republicans will say the same thing in the coming years?

View the complete March 3 article by Cynthia Tucker on the National Memo website here.

The Memo: Trump World faces sea of troubles

Trump loyalists are worried after his former attorney Michael Cohen’s testimony to Congress led Democrats to threaten more hearings and his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ended without an agreement.

None of those developments is ruinous in isolation. But Cohen’s hearing in particular dramatized the power Democrats now hold as the majority party in the House of Representatives — power that they can use to block the president’s domestic legislation and pressure his inner circle to testify.

At best, Trump loyalists say, intense partisan firefights lie ahead.

View the complete March 1 article by Niall Stanage on The Hill website here.