President Trump offered a dry response on Wednesday to the news that his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had pled guilty to a number of campaign-finance crimes in which he implicated the president.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” Trump tweeted early in the morning.
If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018
Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018
The president added later that Cohen “made up stories in order to get a ‘deal,’” but said the campaign-finance violations Cohen is accused of are “not a crime.”
Cohen entered a guilty plea in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday on eight charges, including tax evasion and campaign-finance violations. He implicated his former boss as well, saying that he was acting on the president’s command when he paid for the silence of women who claimed they’d had affairs with Trump, which amounted to unlawfully exorbitant campaign-related payments.
At almost the same moment, a Virginia jury found Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty of tax evasion and bank fraud.
Trump said on Tuesday that he felt “badly” for both Cohen and Manafort, according to a White House transcript.
Cohen, who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump, faces up to 65 years in prison if found guilty of all the charges, but his plea deal now requires that he not challenge a sentence between 46 and 63 months.
Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said his client is “more than happy” to reveal “all that he knows” to special counsel Robert Mueller and has information that would be “of interest” to Mueller.
“The obvious possibility [exists] of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump Tower meeting was all about,” Davis said. “But also [the possibility of] knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and cheered it on.”
Davis also said Cohen is not looking for a pardon from the president, whom he referred to as a “criminal.”
“I know that Mr. Cohen would never accept a pardon from a man that he considers to be both corrupt and a dangerous person in the Oval Office,” he said of his client.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani jumped to the president’s defense, stating, “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen.”