President Donald Trump’s former fixer also said Jay Sekulow dangled a pardon to ‘shut down’ the Russia probe.
Michael Cohen told lawmakers earlier this year that one of President Donald Trump’s personal attorneys asked him to falsely testify to Congress and told him the president was considering granting him a pardon to “shut down” the Russia investigation, according to transcripts released Monday of Cohen’s two private interviews with the House Intelligence Committee.
Cohen said the lawyer, Jay Sekulow, requested he falsely tell Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended on January 31, 2016, nearly six months before they actually fizzled.
Trump’s former fixer also testified during one of those closed-door sessions in February that the president was considering pardons for him and others to “shut down, you know, this investigation.”
Cohen — a former Trump lawyer who is serving a three-year prison sentence for perjury, campaign-finance violations, and tax and bank fraud crimes — answered questions from committee members for more than 16 hours over a two-day period earlier this year. On a party-line vote, the Democrat-led committee released those transcripts Monday evening.
The revelations gleaned from Cohen’s testimony, revealed in more than 600 pages of lawmaker questions and answers with the one-time Trump loyalist, offer Democrats a chance to rekindle public attention on a Russia investigation that has been stymied in recent weeks by a White House eager to turn the page after special counsel Robert Mueller completed his probe.
While Trump’s lawyers quickly downplayed the latest details from Cohen as old news that Mueller had declined to use for any prosecutions, the information nonetheless offers intriguing new lines of inquiry as House Democratic leaders address their own internal clamoring to launch impeachment proceedings against the president.
One of those potential avenues dangling in Cohen’s testimony: He believes Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between his campaign’s senior staffers – Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort – and a Russian lawyer who promised the Republican presidential candidate dirt on his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
To bolster his claim, Cohen described overhearing Trump Jr. tell his father about the meeting before it took place.
“I do,” Cohen said. “I believe Mr. Trump had prior knowledge of that meeting.”
Cohen also provided documents to the House committee showing that Sekulow edited Cohen’s false 2017 testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow project. And when asked by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) in March whether Sekulow knew that Cohen’s “statement about the Trump Tower negotiations ending in January that was part of your original draft was false,” Cohen replied: “Yes, sir.”
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BREAKING: Michael Cohen, who's serving a three-year prison sentence, privately told lawmakers that Trump's current attorney asked him to falsely testify to Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow ended on January 31, 2016https://t.co/OKa67oERsy
— POLITICO (@politico) May 20, 2019
NEWS: House Intel votes to release the transcripts of its Feb & march interviews with Michael Cohen.
LINKS:https://t.co/1MwcKLI1sihttps://t.co/I8XJbcSS8L pic.twitter.com/E41QlScyUY
— Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) May 20, 2019
It’s crucial to develop corroboration for this because nobody sensible would bring a prosecution based on Cohen’s testimony. If Sekulow did it, was he dumb enough to put it in writing? Once I would have said definitely not, but then he became a Trumpalo.https://t.co/RczlTbPBeu
— SnittyGrappleHat (@Popehat) May 20, 2019
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