WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer accused him Wednesday of an expansive pattern of lies and criminality, offering a damning portrayal of life inside the president's orbit where he said advisers sacrificed integrity for proximity to power.
Michael Cohen, who represented Trump for a decade, told Congress that the president lied to the American public about business interests in Russia during the 2016 campaign and lied to reporters about stolen Democratic emails. Trump also told Cohen to lie about illegal hush payments to cover up alleged sexual indiscretions, the lawyer said.
The allegations were aired at a daylong hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
"He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat," Cohen said of the president. Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to lying under oath to Congress, among other crimes, said he did so to protect Trump. "I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore," he said.
Republicans assailed Cohen as a proven liar, and denounced the hearing as a "charade" and an "embarrassment for our country." Democrats said Republicans "ran away from the truth" as they sought to defend a corrupt president who has employed "textbook mob tactics."
Apologizing repeatedly to his family, Cohen, 52, described his 10 years working for Trump as a trip into a world of deceit in which the lawyer ignored his own conscience in order to get close to a magnetic person of power.
"Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong," Cohen said. When he met Trump, he said he knew him as "a real estate giant" and "icon" at the center of the action. "Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating," he said.
In private business, Cohen said he rationalized Trump's dishonesty as "trivial," but as president, he said, "I consider it significant and dangerous."
Cohen said he has come to realize that he sacrificed his own ethics and is now seeking redemption for his own misdeeds. "The more people who follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I'm suffering," he said. "I lost it all."
Cohen soon will report to prison for a three-year sentence. At the same time, he is seen as a vital witness for federal prosecutors because of his proximity to the president during key episodes under investigation and their decade-long professional relationship.
The hearing came while the president was halfway around the world in Vietnam for a meeting with North Korea's leader. Trump's family and advisers expressed anger at the timing of the hearing, arguing that Democrats were undercutting Trump in sensitive nuclear diplomacy for political gain.
The president's re-election campaign organization dismissed Cohen as a convicted perjurer who should not be believed. "This is the same Michael Cohen who has admitted that he lied to Congress previously," Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign's national press secretary, said in a statement. "Why did they even bother to swear him in this time?"
Republicans on the committee challenged Cohen along the same lines. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican, called Cohen a "fraudster, cheat, felon and, in two months, a federal inmate."
Jordan questioned Cohen's motives in assailing Trump's character and actions, suggesting that the former lawyer was embittered because the new president did not take him to Washington.
"You wanted to work in the White House," Jordan said, "and didn't get brought to the dance."
"I did not want to go to the White House," Cohen asserted.
Hours before Cohen's testimony, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., apologized for tweets critical of Cohen, insisting that he did not intend to threaten the former lawyer.
On Tuesday, Gaetz tweeted: "Hey MichaelCohen212 -- Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot."
The tweet prompted some legal observers and Democrats to accuse Gaetz of engaging in witness tampering. About seven hours later, Gaetz issued a mea culpa in a tweet addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
"While it is important 2 create context around the testimony of liars like Michael Cohen, it was NOT my intent to threaten, as some believe I did," he wrote just before midnight Tuesday. "I'm deleting the tweet & should have chosen words that better showed my intent. I'm sorry."
11 CHECKS
On Wednesday, Cohen laid out a series of actions by Trump that bolster previous allegations and presented documents to corroborate his account, including copies of checks issued by the president or his trust that he said were reimbursements for $130,000 in hush payments Cohen made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic-film actress who alleged having a sexual encounter with Trump.
Cohen said Trump, as a candidate, initiated the hush payment plan and, while president, arranged for 11 checks to reimburse Cohen"as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign-finance laws," a crime to which Cohen has pleaded guilty.
After news reports about the payments in February 2018, Cohen told lawmakers, Trump told him to say that the president "was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he wasn't knowledgeable of" Cohen's actions. The former lawyer said he lied to the public and to first lady Melania Trump regarding the payments.
"Lying to the first lady is one of my biggest regrets," Cohen said. "She is a kind, good person. I respect her greatly, and she did not deserve that."
Later, Cohen said he had no "direct evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia." But, he added, "I have my suspicions."
He pointed to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Donald Trump Jr., the candidate's eldest son; Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman met with visiting Russians after being told that they had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.
The president has denied knowing about the meeting at the time, but Cohen cast doubt on that, saying he was in Trump's office one day in June 2016 when Donald Jr. came in, went behind his father's desk and, speaking in a low voice, said, "The meeting is all set." The candidate, he said, replied, "OK, good. Let me know."
Cohen also suggested that Trump wanted him to lie about a Moscow real estate project. Cohen has admitted lying about the project, which he says Trump knew about as Cohen was negotiating with Russia during the campaign. Cohen said Trump did not directly tell him to lie, but "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 another allegation relating to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Cohen said he overheard Trump confidant Roger Stone telling the candidate in the summer of 2016 that WikiLeaks would dump damaging information about Clinton.
Trump put Stone on speakerphone, and Stone told him that he had communicated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that "within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign," according to Cohen. Damaging emails that U.S. officials say were hacked by Russia were later released by WikiLeaks.
Trump responded by saying "wouldn't that be great," Cohen said.
In an interview with The New York Times last month, Trump denied speaking with Stone about WikiLeaks and the emails. Stone has been charged with obstructing justice, making false statements and witness tampering. He disputed Cohen's account Wednesday.
In one revelation, Cohen said prosecutors in New York were investigating conversations Trump or his advisers had with him after his office and hotel room were raided by the FBI last April. Cohen said he could not discuss that conversation, the last contact he said he has had with the president or anyone acting on his behalf, because it remains under investigation.
Cohen compared Trump to a mobster who inflated his net worth, rigged an art auction, frequently used racially offensive language and threatened anyone who got in his way. Cohen estimated that he had threatened someone at Trump's direction perhaps 500 times over 10 years, either berating a "nasty reporter" or warning people of lawsuits.
He provided several documents to the committee. He offered what he said were financial statements that Trump gave to institutions such as Deutsche Bank and said the president inflated or deflated his assets when it served his purposes. He also offered letters that he wrote at Trump's direction to the president's high school, colleges and the College Board threatening them not to release his grades during the 2016 campaign.
Cohen said Trump did not run for president to make the country great, calling it the "greatest infomercial in political history" for his business. "He never expected to win the primary," he said. "He never expected to win the general election. The campaign, for him, was always a marketing opportunity."
As the day progressed, Republicans pressed their argument that Cohen was not to be believed. They argued that he lied even in signing a committee form in which he did not disclose payments he received from a bank in Kazakhstan.
"You're a pathological liar," said Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona.
"Are you referring to me or the president?" Cohen retorted.
Cohen suggested that the panel's Republicans were falling into the trap that he did, trading their honor for a president who did not deserve it.
"I did the same thing that you're doing now for 10 years," he said. "I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years."
Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times; by Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker, Michael R. Sisak, Laurie Kellman, Lisa Mascaro, Chad Day, Michael Balsamo and Colleen Long of The Associated Press; and by Meagan Flynn and Rachael Bade of The Washington Post.
A Section on 02/28/2019