Donald Trump denies campaign finance violations and accuses Michael Cohen of 'flipping'
President Donald Trump has repeated denials of any wrongdoing following allegations of a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of two women who say they had affairs with him.
Mr Trump has been under scrutiny after his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges on Tuesday, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in coordination with Mr Trump.
The president, in a Fox & Friends interview that aired Thursday, downplayed his involvement with Cohen, who worked for him for a decade, saying he was just a “part-time attorney” who had many other clients.
He suggested that Cohen's legal trouble stemmed from his other businesses, including involvement with the New York City taxi cab industry, and that he decided to offer “lies” about Trump to reduce his own legal exposure.
“It's called flipping and it almost should be illegal,” Trump said. “In all fairness to him, most people are going to do that.”
The President fought back on Twitter as well, with a series of Tweets criticising Cohen, and insisting he is subject to a "RIGGED WITCH HUNT".
At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at least seven times that Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges.
She referred substantive questions to the president’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland.
In the interview, he argued, incorrectly, that the hush-money payouts were not “even a campaign violation” because he subsequently reimbursed Cohen for the payments personally instead of with campaign funds.
Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
Cohen had said on Tuesday he secretly used shell companies to make payments used to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
Mr Trump has insisted that he only found out about the payments after they were made, despite the release of a September 2016 taped conversation in which Mr Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing a deal to pay Ms McDougal for her story of a 2006 affair she says she had with Mr Trump.
The White House denied the president had lied, with Ms Sanders calling the assertion “ridiculous”. Yet she offered no explanation for Mr Trump’s shifting accounts.
As Mr Trump vented his frustration, White House aides sought to project a sense of calm.
West Wing staffers absorbed near-simultaneous announcements on Tuesday of the Cohen plea deal and the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges.
Manafort faces trial on separate charges in September in the District of Columbia that include acting as a foreign agent.
Federal prosecutors raided Cohen’s offices months ago — but Mr Trump and his allies were caught off-guard when he also pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes, which, for the first time, took the swirling criminal probes directly to the president.
Both cases resulted, at least in part, from the work of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s attempts to sway voters in the 2016 election.
“The only thing that I have done wrong,” Mr Trump tweeted late on Wednesday, “is to win an election that was expected to be won by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. The problem is, they forgot to campaign in numerous states!”
Meanwhile, Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said on Wednesday that Cohen has information “that would be of interest” to the special counsel.
“There are subjects that Michael Cohen could address that would be of interest to the special counsel,” Mr Davis said in a series of television interviews.
Mr Davis also said Cohen is not looking for a presidential pardon.
Mr Trump, in turn, praised Manafort as “a brave man!”
Manafort, Mr Trump wrote, had “tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’.”
Ms Sanders said the matter of a pardon for Manafort had not been discussed.