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Dec. 13, 2018 / 2:18 PM GMT
By Allan Smith
President Donald Trump unleashed a lengthy tweetstorm on Thursday that marks his first public response to the sentencing of Michael Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, on Wednesday.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law,” Trump said on Twitter. “He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”
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Trump also referenced “campaign finance laws” that he suggested didn’t actually apply to the situation at hand.
It’s an argument the president and other members of his party have made in recent days, claiming that the hush payments Cohen helped facilitate just prior to the 2016 election to a pair of women to ensure silence regarding their alleged affairs with the then-GOP nominee were not instances of major wrongdoing. Some even chalked the situation up to simple filing mistakes.
“Number one, it wasn’t a campaign contribution,” Trump told Reuters of the payments earlier this week. “If it were, it’s only civil, and even if it’s only civil, there was no violation based on what we did. OK?”
Trump has argued that the payments were not made to benefit his candidacy, but rather to hide embarrassing allegations from his family, citing the argument used by former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina in a similar situation.
But Cohen, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to a series of felony counts, including two campaign-finance violations stemming from those hush payments, said under oath that he facilitated those expenditures at Trump’s direction with the purpose of boosting his candidacy. Prosecutors wrote in court documents that the hush payments were made in coordination with then-candidate Trump.
The payments were made to porn star Stormy Daniels and former playboy model Karen McDougal. McDougal’s story was purchased by The National Enquirer’s parent company, whose CEO was a close friend of Trump’s. Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that the company admitted it purchased — and then refused to publish — McDougal’s story in order to benefit Trump’s candidacy, preventing what could have been damaging allegations against him from becoming public before Americans went to the polls.
“I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real estate mogul whose business acumen that I deeply admired,” Cohen told a federal judge at his sentencing in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, saying he worked to cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds.”
Cohen received 3 years in prison for what a Manhattan federal court judge called a “veritable smorgasbord” of criminal conduct.
