The following article by David Nakamura was posted on the Washington Post website April 21, 2018:
Here’s a breakdown of the people that President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen dealt with and the investigations he’s entangled in. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump vowed Saturday that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, will not “flip” and cooperate against him in the special counsel investigation into his campaign’s connections to Russia, attacking a New York Times story as part of a “witch hunt” against him.
In several morning tweets, Trump also lashed out against the Times over its coverage of the investigation. He slammed Maggie Haberman, the lead reporter on a new story, and called a former aide quoted in the story as a “drunk/drugged up loser.”
The tweets were posted around the time Trump headed out of Mar-a-Lago, his winter resort where he has spent the entire week, for a trip to a nearby Trump golf property. It was the second day in a row the president spent at one of his own courses in South Florida.
Trump appeared to be angered by a front-page Times story Saturday that examined his relationship with Cohen, whose office was raided by federal authorities last week. The story cited other former Trump campaign aides, including Sam Nunberg and Roger Stone, as saying Trump has long treated Cohen abusively by insulting him and threatening to fire him.
The story suggested Cohen, who has said he paid off adult-film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to keep quiet her story of an affair with Trump years earlier, could decide to cooperate in the investigation if he faces criminal charges.
In an initial version of his tweetstorm, Trump misspelled Haberman’s last name. He claimed he does not speak with her, even though he has granted her several interviews since taking office and posed with her for a photo in the Oval Office. Trump has known Haberman for years since he was a private developer in New York. The Times’s communication department wrote on Twitter that the paper is “extremely proud” of Haberman and that it stands by the story.
A Times photographer, Tom Brenner, who was part of the press pool following Trump on Saturday morning, posted a photo on Twitter that appeared to show the president looking at a phone.