Erin Durkin – The Guardian
Donald Trump has denied directing his former lawyer and fixer to break the law, a day after Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes committed while working for Trump.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law,” the president said in a tweet on Thursday morning.
Later in the day, Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that he “did nothing wrong” and said prosecutors had cooked up the charges to “embarrass” him.
Cohen, who spent years as one of Trump’s right-hand men, pleaded guilty to federal crimes including making illegal payments to two women who say they had sexual encounters with Trump, in order to keep them quiet about the alleged affairs.
He said, and prosecutors and a judge have also agreed, that he acted “in coordination and at the direction of” Trump and in order to influence the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor.
Trump also claimed that because he acted on “advice of counsel”, he is off the hook for any crime. “A lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid,” he wrote.
Cohen, 52, admitted in August that on the eve of the 2016 presidential election he made a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels and arranged for a $150,000 payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. He pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes, and later pleaded guilty to an additional count of lying to Congress.
The lawyer said he acted out of “blind loyalty to Donald Trump” and “felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds”.
Trump has variously claimed that he didn’t know about the payments, that they were not illegal, and that even if they were illegal they should have been treated as a civil matter.
Before the sentencing, he called for Cohen to serve a full sentence in prison.
On Thursday, Trump insisted that Cohen was guilty of several of the crimes he admitted – which included tax evasion and lying to a bank – but not guilty of the campaign finance crimes, despite his plea.
“Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me, but he plead to two campaign charges which were not criminal and of which he probably was not … guilty even on a civil basis,” wrote.
“Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did-including the fact that his family was temporarily let off the hook. As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me!”
Cohen is cooperating with authorities, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has said he provided valuable information for their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the possibility of collusion with members of Trump’s campaign.
In the interview with Fox News, Trump said: “I never directed him to do anything wrong. Whatever he did, he did on his own. He’s a lawyer. A lawyer who represents a client is supposed to do the right thing. That’s why you pay them a lot of money, etc, etc … I never directed him to do anything incorrect or wrong.”
Trump said he regretted ever hiring Cohen, who he said he hired because Cohen did him a favor serving on the condo board for one of his projects.
“It happens. I mean, look, it happens. I hire usually good people, but it just happens,” Trump said.
“He did very low-level work. He did more public relations than he did law. You’d see him on television. He was OK on television,” Trump said.
“I thought he was a great guy. I thought he was really a nice guy. He was very supportive and I liked him, and he was a lawyer, and because of that I did it. And you know what, in retrospect I made a mistake. Because what he did was all unrelated to me except for the two campaign finance charges that are not criminal and shouldn’t have been there. They put that on to embarrass me. They put those two charges on to embarrass me.”
As the Fox interviewer attempted to change to subject to a poll by the network showing him with a relatively favorable 46% approval rating, Trump pivoted back to the scandals swirling around his administration.
“I think it’s amazing, because I only get bad news. I only get bad stories. You look at the papers, it’s all nonsense,” he said.