Pressure on Trump rises after Cohen threat to aid Mueller

Within hours of Michael Cohen pleading guilty to helping Donald Trump silence a porn star and a Playboy playmate who had both claimed affairs with the now president more than a decade ago, he fired another shot across the bow of his former boss.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer for Mr Cohen, said his client “has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel”, in a reference to the investigation by Robert Mueller into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“Cohen . . . is now liberated to tell the truth, everything about Donald Trump that he knows,” Mr Davis told MSNBC about the president’s former fixer-in-chief. “From this point on, you’re going to see a liberated Michael Cohen speaking truth to power.”

In a dramatic day on Tuesday when Paul Manafort, the Republican lobbyist who ran Mr Trump’s campaign, was separately convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud, Mr Cohen said he had arranged payments to two women — a porn star named Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model called Karen McDougal — “at the direction” of Mr Trump.

His testimony was the first suggestion by a former member of the Trump inner circle that the president may have committed a crime. It sparked questions over whether Mr Trump is in legal jeopardy for his alleged role orchestrating the silencing effort.

But the threat that Mr Cohen might co-operate with Mr Mueller, who is also investigating whether the president obstructed justice in relation to the Russia probe — suggested that Mr Trump may be entering rockier waters.

Mr Davis suggested that Mr Cohen had details of a 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son, met a Russian lawyer after being told she had incriminating information on Hillary Clinton. Mr Trump initially said the meeting — which he has denied advance knowledge of — was about Russia-related adoptions, but later said it was aimed at getting damaging details about his opponent.

Mr Davis said Mr Cohen had information on “the obviously possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump tower meeting was all about”. He said his client could also help Mr Mueller understand if Mr Trump had any advance knowledge about the alleged Russian hacking of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee in 2016.

The threat from Mr Cohen sparked an angry reaction from Mr Trump who said his former lawyer was making up stories to get a deal. “If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” he said.

Mr Trump, who denies having an affair with Ms Daniels, has previously been undermined by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor acting as his personal lawyer. After it emerged that Mr Cohen paid $130,000 to the porn star, Mr Giuliani said Mr Trump had reimbursed Mr Cohen, in what was a botched effort to argue that there was no campaign finance law violation, one of the charges Mr Cohen admitted to on Tuesday.

Mr Trump and Mr Giuliani are pushing a public-relations campaign — the president on twitter and his lawyer on television — to both discredit Mr Cohen and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation in the minds of the American public. Mr Trump on Wednesday repeated his refrain that the Russia probe was a “witch hunt”.

One significant unanswered question is whether Mr Mueller would try to indict Mr Trump even if he had a strong case. Many, but not all, lawyers say he is bound by an opinion from Office of Legal Counsel, an arm of the justice department, which says presidents are immune from prosecution. But no court — even the Supreme Court in a 1974 case about Richard Nixon — has ruled on what is a constitutional issue.

Mr Mueller is expected to produce a report on his conclusions, regardless of whether he pushes for any indictment. Many experts believe that any evidence of wrongdoing by Mr Trump outlined in that report will increase momentum behind those Democrats who believe that the party should push for impeachment no matter the consequences.

Following the Cohen plea, there has been more talk about whether Mr Trump faces a higher chance of impeachment, assuming the Democrats win the House in the November congressional midterm elections. Recognising the threat, the White House on Tuesday said Mr Trump would campaign more than any of his predecessors to boost the GOP’s chances of preventing a Democratic “blue wave”.

The OLC legal question also applies to the Southern District of New York, whose prosecutors charged Mr Cohen. While Mr Davis argued that Mr Trump faced legal jeopardy over the same campaign finance law that Mr Cohen violated, some lawyers said that the US attorney for the southern district was also bound by the OLC opinion.

“As independent as the southern district is, I don’t think they would indict a sitting president if OLC said that was not permitted under the constitution,” said Harry Sandick, a former southern district prosecutor now at the law firm Patterson Belknap.

Follow Demetri Sevastopulo on Twitter: @dimi