President Donald Trump continues to have reason to worry. This week, his former lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes including campaign finance law violations that he was involved with, and Cohen now says that Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller has a “substantial” amount of information backing up the claims he’s made as part of the cooperation associated with his guilty pleas.
He told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos — who he’s actually participated in a high profile interview with before:
‘The special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them was credible and helpful. There’s a substantial amount of information that they possess that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth… I am done with the lying and being loyal to President Trump, and my first loyalty belongs to my wife, my daughters, my son, and this country.’
Watch below.
EXCLUSIVE: “The special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them was credible,” Michael Cohen tells @ABC.
“There’s a substantial amount of information that they possess that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.” https://t.co/qBfZpX6n4s pic.twitter.com/WSlUZr2eOI
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 14, 2018
His claims under scrutiny include that well into mid-2016, the Trump team pursued a Trump Tower Moscow deal so intertwined with the Kremlin that Vladimir Putin was going to get a penthouse. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about that effort, which never materialized but saw him personally in touch with a deputy to Putin’s office and deeply considering traveling to Moscow during the presidential campaign or having Trump go.
These efforts could have figured prominently in Trump’s reasoning for his at this point well documented soft stance on Russia. During the campaign, the GOP under his team’s leadership caved on everything from Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula to their intrusion into the 2016 electoral process. Trump still has to be goaded into admitting the glaring mountains of evidence the Kremlin sought to tip the election in his favor even exist — and even then, to him it’s still a witch hunt.
Cohen hasn’t only spoken to the special counsel’s office about matters that for now remain at least somewhat redacted. He’s also implicated the president in those aforementioned campaign finance violations, which constituted a scheme to get women with whom he’d had affairs to keep quiet.
That didn’t work.
Trump has claimed, in similar fashion to his insistence the Trump Tower Moscow project was “very legal and very cool,” that he has nothing to be worried about in the hush money scandal.
This week, in the same commentary, he claimed Cohen should himself alone be considered responsible for breaking the law and… didn’t break the law after all?
He offered:
‘I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law… a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made… Despite that many campaign finance lawyers have strongly stated that I did nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws, if they even apply, because this was not campaign finance.’
Unsurprisingly, Trump doesn’t say who these “many campaign finance lawyers” are.
Trump doesn’t just get to pronounce that campaign finance laws don’t apply to him in this situation because he doesn’t want them to. He’s just making himself look like an idiot who didn’t get the memo that the jig is up since yes, the involved parties originally sought to make it seem like the hush money wasn’t meant to prop up the campaign — but in reality, it was.
Incoming House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has suggested Trump could see jail time after leaving office over the issue.
Featured Image via screenshot from the video
