WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump on Monday called for his former personal attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen to receive a “long prison term,” while suggesting his former employee’s wife and father-in-law also committed crimes.
Cohen asked a federal judge to opt against giving him jail time in a document filed Friday night. In the same document, he goes further than in documents released last week by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office in which Cohen admitted to lying to Congress about his work on behalf of Trump when he was a candidate as he tried to secure approval for a hotel project in Moscow.
“In fact, Michael had a lengthy substantive conversation with the personal assistant to a Kremlin official following his outreach in January 2016, engaged in additional communications concerning the project as late as June 2016, and kept Client-1 apprised of these communications,” the lawyers wrote. Client-1 is how Trump is referred to in the document filed Friday.
Mueller determined Cohen lied to congressional investigators, and Cohen admitted to making false statements about the nature and scope of work he did on the Moscow tower project, including revealing the work went on well into Trump’s 2016 campaign for the White House.