President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, believes his former client is lying when it comes to special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion between Trump’s campaign team and Russia.
Asked point-blank whether he believed Trump was telling the truth about the probe, Cohen simply said no.
Related: Michael Cohen says Trump knew hush payments were wrong
For his part, the former Trump lawyer said he was “done with the lying.” He added, “I am done being loyal to President Trump and my first loyalty belongs to my wife, my daughter, my son and this country.”
Asked why he should be believed now, Cohen said, “Because the special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them is credible and helpful. There’s a substantial amount of information that they possessed that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.”
Cohen also said that the president knew that what he was doing was “wrong” when he allegedly directed his then-lawyer to make hush money payments to women claiming to have had affairs with the U.S. leader in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” Cohen said. “I stood up before the world [on Wednesday] and I accepted the responsibility for my actions,” the former Trump lawyer said of his sentencing earlier this week.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison for financial crimes, lying to Congress and campaign finance violations in connection with the hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and Karen McDougal, who have both claimed to have had affairs with Trump more than a decade ago.
Asked whether he believed the president also knew it was wrong to make the payments, Cohen replied, “Of course,” adding that the purpose of the hush money was to “help” Trump “and his campaign.”
The lawyer said that Trump had been “very concerned” about how the allegations of affairs would “affect the election” if they were to go public.
He said that while he is “angry at himself” for his role in executing the deals, he did so out of “blind loyalty” to Trump, for whom he once said he would “take a bullet.”
“I gave loyalty to someone who, truthfully, does not deserve loyalty,” he said.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York recently implicated Trump in the deals, without charging the president.
They alleged that Cohen had made the payments “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump.
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, exits federal court after his sentencing hearing, in New York, on December 12. Cohen has said the president is lying about the Russia-Trump investigation. Drew Angerer/Getty
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