President Donald Trump is trolling his former personal attorney Michael Cohen on Twitter, reminding him he once defended his son, while hitting the ‘fake news media’ for its coverage of the saga.
‘Do you think the Fake News Media will ever report on this tweet from Michael?,’ Trump wrote on Sunday morning with a retweet of Cohen from July 11, 2017, where the attorney posted a picture of Donald Trump Jr. with the words: ‘So proud of @DonaldTrumpJr for being open, honest and transparent to the American people. This nonsense needs to stop!’
The back-and-forth between the presidential and his former fixer has reached soap opera like proportions as concerns grow that Cohen has turned on his former boss.
Trump reminded Cohen he defended his son at the time the Trump Tower meeting was reported
Michael Cohen is Trump’s former personal attorney
Trump took to the social media network to remind Cohen he had defended his son at the time the infamous Trump Tower meeting was reported.
In July 2017, a few days before Cohen’s tweet that the president referenced, The New York Times reported Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer – who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton – at Trump Tower during the height of the presidential campaign.
That June 9, 2016 meeting has become a major headache for the president. The Washington Post reported he personally crafted the response to the story from aboard Air Force One.
Both meeting and its fallout have become a major part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election and whether the president obstructed justice.
Trump denied on Friday that he had any advance knowledge of the now-infamous 2016 meeting attended by his son, his son-in-law, his campaign chairman and the Russian attorney.
Reports based on unnamed sources swirled Thursday night that Cohen is prepared to tell Mueller that the president knew about the meeting ahead of time and approved of it.
Cohen, under the thumb of a federal investigation springing from a payoff to a porn actress who claimed before the 2016 election that she had bedded Trump, has become a reluctant apostate. He has turned on his former longtime boss in an effort to appease Mueller, hiring longtime Bill and Hillary Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis to plead his case.
‘NO, I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.,’ Trump said Friday in a series of tweets. ‘Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!’
President Donald Trump suggested Friday that he never knew in advance about a 2016 meeting between his son, his son-in-law, his campaign chairman and a Kremlin-tied lawyer
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney seen here leaving his NYC hotel and getting into a taxi today, is reportedly prepared to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he was in the room when the future president approved of the meeting – which was offered with the promise of opposition dirt on Hillary Clinton
An epic Twitter rant from the president on Friday included claims that Cohen is ‘trying to make up stories’ to save his own skin, and complaints about Mueller using his tweets as the basis for a claim of obstruction of justice
Sources close to Cohen, according to CNN, now say he is prepared to tell Mueller that he was in the room when Trump was told that a Russian lawyer wanted a meeting with Don Jr.
The lawyer, the Kremlin-connected Natalia Veselnitskaya, promised to bring helpful dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Instead she used the meeting to argue for the relaxation of U.S. sanctions against Russia that drove President Vladimir Putin to retaliate – in part by banning Americans from adopting Russian children.
Jared Kushner, who is married to first daughter Ivanka Trump, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, now awaiting trial on federal money-laundering and conspiracy charges, both attended the brief session at Trump Tower.
The jab about taxis refers to former Cohen business partner Evgeny ‘Gene’ Freidman, known as New York’s ‘Taxi King,’ who pleaded guilty to tax evasion in May and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Trump also mocked Mueller’s team on Friday for sifting through his social media postings as part of a wide-ranging investigation into alleged ties between the Kremlin and the president’s campaign organization.
On Twitter, Trump called Mueller ‘highly conflicted’ and sniped that he was ‘looking at my Tweets (along with 53 million other people).’
Donald Trump Jr. (left) and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner (right) were both in attendance when Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya made a brief pitch
Veselnitskaya was initially hawking damaging material on Hillary Clinton but produced nothing of use to the Trump campaign
Cohen has hired Lanny Davis, a former ClintonWhite House official and longtime confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, to defend him and plead his case publicly
Law enforcement investigators routinely examine ‘open source’ information – publicly available material – in addition to sifting through confidential documents and conducting private interviews.
But Trump bristled at the idea of his own Justice Department’s senior officials scrutinizing his use of the very platform he’s used for more than a year to criticize them.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Mueller is poring over Trump’s tweets about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and fired FBI Director James Comey.
He also wants to ask the president about those tweets in a formal setting.
Any public statements that denounce or reprimand officials investigating him could be seen as obstruction of justice under some theories of prosecution.
Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, dismissed the idea of intimidating witnesses via Twitter.
‘If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,’ he told the Times.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is examining President Trump’s tweets for evidence ofwhether he obstructed the Russia investigation
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, said Thursday that ‘if you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public’
Trump cast the news as part of a broader, unfair attack against him.
‘[T]he rigged Witch Hunt continues! How stupid and unfair to our Country,’ he tweeted Friday.
Trump uses his Twitter account to blast his enemies, praise his supporters, slam the ‘fake media’ and tout his version of events.
He frequently calls Mueller’s probe of Russia’s role in the 2016 election and whether the president obstructed it a ‘witch hunt,’ railing against the ’13 angry Democrats’ he claims lead it.
He hasn’t called out Cohen by name since his former attorney turned on him. Longtime Trump-watchers say that’s a sign he’s completely written off the man who was once just one step below him on his company’s organizational chart.
Giuliani on Thursday night called Cohen a ‘pathological liar.’
‘He’s been lying all week, for two weeks, he’s been lying for years,’ the former New York Mayor said, defending his Oval Office client.