Michael Cohen was in the room when President Trump and his eldest son discussed a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who had promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, Cohen’s attorney said Wednesday, casting doubt over the President’s statements on the matter.
Pressed on what evidence Cohen has that Trump knew ahead of time about the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Lanny Davis told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer his client heard a pertinent conversation between the President and Donald Trump Jr.
“I can only say that he was present during a discussion with Jr. and dad, and beyond that, his testimony to the Senate Intelligence and House Intelligence committees was accurate,” Davis said, declining to elaborate.
Cohen, 51, testified to the congressional committees last year neither he nor Trump had any advanced knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting — which has become a focal point in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the President’s campaign and the Russian government.
But, because Cohen pleaded guilty to a laundry list of crimes Tuesday, Davis has been on a media blitz, promising his client actually has evidence the President had advanced knowledge of the meeting. Davis also says his client has information “of interest” to Mueller about “the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt” the 2016 election.
The President and his spokespeople have on several occasions switched their story about the Trump Tower meeting, which was hosted by Trump Jr. and attended by since-convicted campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya.
At first, the Trump camp insisted the sit-down focused solely on U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans.
But Trump admitted in a tweet earlier this month that his “wonderful son” hosted the meeting under the premise that Veselnitskaya could provide politically damaging information about Clinton. Trump claimed he had no prior knowledge of the meeting and insisted his son didn’t follow up after it turned out Veselnitskaya had no information of interest.
Veselnitskaya has deep ties to the Russian government and admitted in April she serves as an “informant” to a top Kremlin official.
As a candidate, Trump celebrated WikiLeaks’ mass releases of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The stolen emails were provided to WikiLeaks as part of Russia’s Trump-boosting interference efforts in the 2016 election, according to a unanimous assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.
