Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer, has given dramatic testimony before the House Oversight Committee, were he discussed a criminal conspiracy involving the president, his oldest son Donald Trump Jr, and the chief financial officer of the Trump Organisation, Allen Weisselberg — and then cast the president as an existential threat to American democracy.
During one particularly notable exchange, Cohen was asked by Democratic Representative Ro Khanna about a cheque making a payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which he called a "smoking gun" that proves several individuals were involved in the conspiracy.
"Are you telling us, Mr Cohen, that the president directed transactions in conspiracy with Allen Weisselberg and his son, Donald Trump Jr, as part of a criminal conspiracy of financial fraud?" Mr Khanna asked in relation to the cheque. "Is that your testimony today?"
"Yes," Cohen said.
Cohen, who will serve a three year prison sentence starting in May, said during his testimony that he believes the US is at a critical juncture in its history. Mr Trump, a man who Cohen once said he would take a bullet for, is a threat to American democracy, he said.
"If he loses the [2020] election, I worry there would never be a peaceful transition of power," he said.
Throughout his hours-long testimony on Wednesday, Cohen said that he is remorseful for ever allowing himself to end up in Mr Trump's inner circle. Cohen, who worked as the president's private attorney for a decade said that he had caused considerable damage to his family and reputation — and repeatedly apologised even as Republicans questioned why they should believe his testimony given he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress once before already.
“I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience,” Cohen said.
Cohen also suggested that the president was aware that political consultant Roger Stone was in discussion with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about the site’s access to stolen Democratic National Committee emails.
The president's former personal attorney said that he was in a room when Mr Stone told Mr Trump about the leaks, and that nobody made an effort to contact the FBI regarding those leaks.
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Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of what promises to be an explosive day in Washington, DC.
Wow. Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former right-hand man, will testify before the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill today and has some extraordinary things to say for himself.
According to an advanced copy of his 20-page statement, the man branded "a rat" by the president will call his old boss "a racist, a conman and a cheat”.
“I am ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty – of the things I did for Mr Trump in an effort to protect and promote him,” he will say.
“I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.”
Cohen appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors yesterday and will speak to the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, also in private.
He pleaded guilty on 29 November last year to criminal charges including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. In December, he was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes including orchestrating "hush money" payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal in violation of campaign laws before the 2016 election.
Here's Andrew Buncombe with a full report.
Trump's former lawyer to tell Congress president is 'a racist, a conman and a cheat'
Ex-lawyer claims president was aware Roger Stone was talking to WikiLeaks about hacked DNC emailsOn his accusation that Donald Trump is "racist", Cohen will tell Congress the following:
"Mr Trump is a racist. The country has seen Mr Trump court white supremacists and bigots. You have heard him call poorer countries 'shitholes'.
"In private, he is even worse."
"He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn't a 'shithole'. This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States.
"While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way.
"And, he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.
"And yet I continued to work for him."
Michael Cohen will also describe Mr Trump as "a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails".
He will say he overheard Mr Stone on speakerphone telling Mr Trump about the news from WikiLeaks in 2016 and that it could damage Hillary Clinton's cause. "Wouldn't that be great?" the candidate responded.
He will say that "Mr Trump knew of and directed the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations through the campaign and lied about it... "He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project."
The president's lawyers "reviewed and edited" Cohen's untrue statement to Congress on the matter in 2017, he alleges.
Cohen will further recount an incident he dates to June 2016, when he witnessed Donald Trump Jr, the president's son, walk behind his father's desk and say in a low voice: "The meeting is all set".
He suggests this must have related to the Trump Tower meeting attended by Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and at least five others on procuring "dirt" on presidential rival Hillary Clinton.
President Trump, in Vietnam for a nuclear summit with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, is already tweeting on Cohen, seeking to discredit his old friend ahead of his appearance in Washington today:
Here's our story on this breaking development.
Trump erupts over explosive Michael Cohen testimony calling president a 'racist conman'
Donald Trump has responded angrily to reports his former lawyer will testify that he is a racist conman, claiming Michael Cohen's allegations are an attempt to reduce his prison timeA lot to pick through in Michael Cohen's pre-released statement but this is certainly a good point - a detail easy to overlook in the "new normal" of presidential chaos.
On a personal level, Cohen will admit:
“I am not a perfect man. I have done things I am not proud of, and I will live with the consequences of my actions for the rest of my life.
“But today, I get to decide the example I set for my children and how I attempt to change how history will remember me. I may not be able to change the past, but I can do right by the American people here today.”
President Trump's current attorney, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, has issued a statement, counter-claiming that it is Cohen who is the liar.
“It’s pathetic. This is a lawyer who tapped his own client when he claimed he was being loyal. If you believe him you are a fool,” he said.
“He bragged he was connected to Russian organised crime and he may be. His father in law who gave him millions to [invest] was convicted of tax fraud in a money laundering operation. Let’s see if these Democrats want to ask about his many crimes having nothing to do with anyone but his coterie of business associates with questionable connections.”
Among the many ludicrous claims Cohen will make to the Oversight Committee, led by Representative Elijah Cummings, is that Donald Trump inflated his assets to make it onto a list of the richest Americans and deflated them to pay lower taxes on his golf courses.
One of the most revealing of all as to the president's insecurities is that he asked Cohen to pressure his former schools to ensure they never leaked his exam results.
“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” he says in his statement.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis.
Trump sent letters to his former schools threatening them not to release his test scores, Michael Cohen says
US president branded 'racist, conman, and cheat' by former lawyerThis characterisation of the president is particularly stinging from Cohen.
Here's Trump on the Vietnam War, a conflict he avoided being drafted for because of "bone spurs", which Cohen suggests was a bogus claim.
"You think I'm stupid, I wasn't going to Vietnam," he told his former confidant. Yikes.
Worth remembering that the president's grandfather, German immigrant Frederick Drumpf, arrived in New York in October 1885 from Kallstadt as a 16-year-old boy seeking to evade military conscription in his homeland.
The president is of course in Vietnam right now to meet Mr Kim, an irony not lost on satirists at The Onion.
Given the below, this attack on Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal - accused of misrepresenting his military career to suggest he had served in the Vietnam War during a 2010 Senate run, when he had actually received five draft deferments (just as Trump himself did) - is particularly hypocritical.
That tweet appears to be a response to this, in which Senator Blumenthal condemned President Trump's national emergency declaration in strong terms.
All this and we haven't had time to mention the fact that Florida congressman and Trump ally Matt Gaetz threatened Michael Cohen on Twitter last night.
"Hey @MichaelCohen212, do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot..."
After writing the above, he told reporters he was not witness-tampering, but "witness-testing".
Representative Gaetz has since deleted the above and responded to a thinly-veiled rebuke from House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
CNN's Chris Cillizza calls the tweet "thuggery that should be beneath even someone as brazenly political and calculating as Gaetz", pointing to his fondness for deep state conspiracy theories and a GQ profile from last year that called him "the Trumpiest Congressman in Trump's Washington" for his blind loyalty to the president.
Mr Trump's opinion of Gaetz?
Michael Cohen's lawyer Lanny Davis said of last night's incident:
"We will not respond to Mr. Gaetz's despicable lies and personal smears, except to say we trust that his colleagues in the House, both Republicans and Democrats, will repudiate his words and his conduct.
"I also trust that his constituents will not appreciate that their congressman has set a new low, which in today's political culture is hard to imagine as possible."
A few other Trump-related bits to catch up on.
The president has praised his "friend" Kim Jong-un ahead of their meeting in Hanoi today, ignoring Pyongyang's wretched human rights record. Andrew Buncombe has this.
Trump praises 'friend' Kim Jong-un, leader of 'worst human rights abusing government in the world'
North Korea accused of 'forced and child labour, systemic suppression of free expression and civil society'You can follow dedicated live coverage of the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi with Harry Cockburn below:
World waits for historic meeting between Trump and Kim - follow live updates
Follow the latest updates on the meetingYesterday, which already feels like a millennia ago, House Democrats voted in favour of opposing President Trump's national emergency declaration on the illegal immigration "crisis" at the southwestern border.
The move granted Mr Trump special executive powers to bypass Congress and reallocate federal funding to get his Mexico border wall built.
The resolution will now go before the Senate, where only a handful of Republican defections would be needed to see it passed and presented to the Oval Office, where the president would be forced to veto it at great personal cost to his credibility.
Here's Clark Mindock.
House votes to block Trump’s national emergency declaration
The measure now goes before the Senate, where a handful of Republicans have indicated they plan on voting to block Mr Trump's declaration as wellAlso yesterday, Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan became the first congressional lawmakers to sign a pledge to impeach President Trump on behalf of advocacy group By The People.
“This is not an issue of Republicans vs. Democrats,” its spokesperson Alexandra Flores-Quilty said in a statement.
“It’s about checking the flagrant abuse of presidential power from a white supremacist who is profiting off of the presidential office, abusing his powers, and undermining our democracy and our Constitution.”
Here's Sarah Harvard.
Tlaib and Omar first congress lawmakers to sign ‘Pledge to Impeach’ Trump
'We’re going to hold everyone accountable to the law, including the president of of the United States'Michael Cohen's date with the House Oversight Committee is set for 10am EST (3pm GMT) today.
Before then, here's some background reading on the would-be tough guy in the hot seat.
Michael Cohen: The New York fixer who could bring down Trump's presidency
Long-serving, fiercely loyal advocate to be sentenced for financial crimes carried out on behalf of boss he once said he would 'take a bullet for'The story of a fat rat becoming stuck in a manhole cover in Germany is already being likened to Michael Cohen.
A suspiciously perfect, meme-ready story to have emerged today - no?
The fact that President Trump's meeting with Mr Kim in Vietnam, which has just taken place at the Metropole hotel in Hanoi, coincides with the Cohen testimony risks America's standing abroad, according to pundits.
“The real danger for US credibility and national security is the extent to which the Cohen testimony makes the American president look ridiculous and compromised around the world, which carefully consumes US political news,” says Benjamin J Rhodes, Barack Obama's former deputy national security adviser.
“At home, we can see these things as just another turn in the tabloid drama of the Trump presidency, but the cumulative impact abroad is a steady diminution of America’s standing.”
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