WASHINGTON | President Donald Trump, enraged over a deal his personal attorney Michael Cohen cut with prosecutors, said it might be better if “flipping” were outlawed because people “just make up lies.”
In an interview Thursday morning, Trump tried to play down his relationship with Cohen who claims the president directed a hush-money scheme to purchase the silence of two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump. The president maintained Cohen only worked for him part time.
“I know all about flipping,” Trump said Wednesday. “For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they — they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.”
That tool “almost ought to be outlawed. It’s not fair,” Trump said, adding it creates an incentive to “say bad things about somebody … just make up lies.”
Trump’s White House struggled to manage the fallout from Cohen’s plea deal and the conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges.
Speculation that Democrats would launch impeachment proceedings if they win the House of Representatives this fall has started to rise. However, Trump argued the move could have dire economic consequences.
“If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” Trump said. He added: “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job.”
Cohen, who says he won’t seek a pardon from Trump, pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight charges, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in coordination with Trump. Trump has privately expressed worry and frustration that a man intimately familiar with his political, personal and business dealings for more than a decade flipped on him.
Yet, Trump’s administration showed no clear strategy for managing the fallout. At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted at least seven times that Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges. She referred substantive questions to the president’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland.
In the interview, Trump argued, incorrectly, that the hush-money payouts weren’t “even a campaign violation” because he also reimbursed Cohen for the payments personally instead of with campaign funds. Federal law restricts how much money individuals can donate to a campaign, it bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
Cohen had said previously that he secretly used shell companies to filter payments used to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
