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Cohen cops to lying to Congress as Mueller’s Russia probe gathers steam
WASHINGTON — The slow-motion suspense of Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia sped up suddenly Thursday as Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, admitted to a New York judge he lied to congressional investigators last year about discussions surrounding an aborted plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
The surprise pivot, which the president promptly shrugged off as a last-ditch bid for a reduced sentence on Cohen’s unrelated convictions for tax evasion and bank fraud, came just days after Trump submitted written answers to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller.
In a statement in court, Cohen described how his role as a lawyer and fixer for Trump bridged the former chief executive’s transformation from Manhattan real-estate mogul to presidential candidate in 2016, and how he followed his boss’s script of “repeated disavowals” of ties to Russia.
And he described telling two congressional intelligence committees that the discussions about Trump possibly building one of his trademark skyscrapers in Moscow had come to a halt by January 2016, when the presidential campaign was ramping up in advance of the Iowa caucuses.