Trump Downplays Ex-Campaign Manager, Personal Lawyer Becoming Felons

The most striking revelation was Cohen’s claim that a 2016 presidential candidate – Trump – directed him to pay hush money in exchange for two women’s silence about alleged affairs.

It seems the payments to two women who claimed they had sex with Donald Trump was not the only payment former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made on behalf of the candidate. There were others that were involved in paying these phony invoices that were created to pay money back to Michael Cohen that he had put forward to [former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels]. Facing up to five years in prison, the admissions were a dramatic change from Cohen’s earlier boasts that he was Trump’s “fixer” and would “take a bullet” for the president.

Trump has repeatedly denied having any knowledge of the payments at the time, while accepting they were made using his funds – to which Cohen had access.

“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family, ‘ Trump wrote”.

One of the legal issues in Cohen’s indictment is that the payments amounted to a campaign contribution, and one that was not reported to the Federal Election Commission.

“Doesn’t involve me”, Trump told reporters.

Both parties did agree that Trump should not consider a pardon for either Manafort or Cohen.

The state’s attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump, three of his children and his foundation in June, saying Trump had illegally used the nonprofit as a personal “checkbook” for his own benefit, including his 2016 presidential campaign. On the way to West Virginia aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, the president watched Fox News coverage of the Manafort verdict and Cohen’s plea, two people familiar with the matter said. Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal doesn’t mean that implicates the President on anything.

The Cohen and Manafort developments marked a significant breakthrough for Mueller’s investigation, putting Trump and his allies on the offensive.

At the White House briefing, Sanders said more than a half dozen times that “the president did nothing wrong”. One of the few statements from Republican leaders came from an unnamed spokesperson for House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said the speaker was aware of Cohen’s plea to “these serious charges” and needed “more information than is now available at this point”.

Cohen previously released audio of a phone call he had with Trump discussing the handling of the Daniels payment.

Still, there’s no doubt that August 21, 2018, will go down in history as an extraordinary moment in the Trump presidency – and for the American presidency, an office steeped in dignity and tradition but hardly immune to the foibles of its occupants, as many past presidents have shown.

Cohen told the court he had made the payments for the “principal objective of influencing the election”.

Trump spoke out a day after taking a remarkable one-two legal punch, courtesy of Cohen as well as his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

However, Cohen could still cooperate with investigators in order to reduce his sentence, and Manafort faces another trial in Washington, D.C. Cohen’s lawyer, former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis, said his client has information about “hacking”.