Michael Cohen: Trump is a ‘conman’ and a ‘cheat’

Michael Cohen, the longtime lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, on Wednesday will tell Congress his former boss is a “conman” who indirectly told him to lie about business his real estate empire was seeking in Russia during the presidential race.

In an opening statement Mr Cohen will give to the House oversight committee, he will also accuse the former New York property mogul of being a “racist” and a “cheat”.

The testimony will come as Mr Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi for a second summit to discuss denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula. He responded on Twitter, insisting Mr Cohen was “lying in order to reduce his prison time”.

Mr Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress when he told lawmakers Mr Trump was no longer seeking to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 race, will tell the committee that he wanted to correct the record.

“The last time I appeared before Congress, I came to protect Mr Trump. Today, I’m here to tell the truth about Mr Trump,” he said in the statement published ahead of the Capitol Hill hearing, adding that negotiations about the Moscow project continued “for months during the [presidential] campaign”.

“Mr Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr Cohen said. “In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.”

Mr Cohen added Mr Trump asked him about the status of the Moscow Tower project six times during the first half of 2016, when the Republican presidential primary was in full swing.

“Mr Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.”

Mr Cohen’s prepared testimony emerged as Mr Trump was starting a series of meetings with the president and prime minister of Vietnam. He is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill shortly after Mr Trump has dinner with Mr Kim on Wednesday in Hanoi.

Mr Trump responded shortly before the dinner, attempting to undermine Mr Cohen’s credibility as a witness. “Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the State Supreme Court for lying & fraud,” Mr Trump wrote. “He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time.”

Earlier, Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, responded to suggestions Mr Cohen would accuse Mr Trump of criminal conduct by saying: “It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”

Mr Cohen will begin a three-year prison sentence in early May after pleading guilty to eight criminal counts. One of those charges related to his involvement in a scheme to pay two women, including adult film actress Stormy Daniels, not to make public claims that Mr Trump had affairs with them after his marriage to his current wife Melania.

Federal prosecutors have alleged Mr Cohen made the payments “at the direction” of Mr Trump. In his statement, Mr Cohen said he would give the Democratic-led committee a copy of a personal cheque that Mr Trump wrote — after becoming president — to “reimburse me for the hush money payments I made to cover up his affair with an adult film star and prevent damage to his campaign”.

The congressional testimony comes amid reports that Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating the role that Russia played in the 2016 election, is preparing to wrap up his investigation. Mr Cohen has co-operated with Mr Mueller’s inquiry.

The probe has also looked at possible contacts between the Trump presidential campaign and the Kremlin, and also whether Mr Trump attempted to obstruct justice when he fired James Comey as director of the FBI.

Some Republicans are trying to portray Mr Cohen as an unreliable witness who is seeking revenge against the president for not coming to his defence. Mr Cohen, who was known as “Fido” because of his fierce loyalty, once said he would “take a bullet” to protect his former boss.
In his statement, Mr Cohen accused Mr Trump of being a “cheat” and said he was providing the committee with Mr Trump’s financial statements from 2011-2013. He said Mr Trump gave the documents to Deutsche Bank as part of an effort to seek a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills, an American football team.

“It was my experience that Mr Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” he said.

Mr Cohen also alleged that Mr Trump knew in advance about the release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee that were seen as damaging to Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign.

He described Mr Trump taking a call over speakerphone from Roger Stone, the political operative and longtime friend of Mr Trump, shortly before the Democratic convention in July 2016. Mr Mueller has charged Mr Stone with seven counts related to congressional testimony he gave about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the 2016 race.

“Mr Stone told Mr Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange and that Mr Assange told Mr Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Mr Cohen said. “Mr Trump responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great’.”

Mr Cohen also accused his former boss of being a “racist” who once asserted that black people would never vote for him “because they were too stupid”. He said the country had seen Mr Trump court white supremacists but that he was “even worse” in private.

“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole’,” Mr Cohen said. “This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States.”

In his statement, Mr Cohen said Mr Trump had asked him to handle the negative publicity about him not serving in Vietnam that emerged after his remark that John McCain, the recently deceased senator who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, was not a war hero.

“Mr Trump claimed it [his not serving in Vietnam] was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery . . . He finished the conversation with the following comment. ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam’.”

In the 20-page opening statement, Mr Cohen claimed Mr Trump ran for president not because he believed he could win — which Mr Cohen said the then New York mogul did not — but to enhance his brand.

“He had no desire or intention to lead this nation — only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history’.”