to whether or not he directed payments to the porn star stormy daniels to cover up an alleged relationship with her. adjusting michael cohen s testimony when it comes to the trump tower moscow project, michael cohen s claims that the president was trying to hide what he really owed in his taxes and what he really should have been paying to insurance companies for his properties and so on. just lie after lie after lie that michael cohen was testifying that the president was essentially directing him to issue to the public over the course of his career as a personal fixer for donald trump. and wolf, it was just remarkable. because i ve known michael cohen for some time now. having covered that campaign. and we all know michael cohen is being somebody who, as he liked to tell people, would take a bullet for the president. but he went from essentially the fixer for the president, to somebody who almost sounded like they were full blown resistance by the end of the hearing and when michael
care in this instance to make sure what put forward as a guise of a retainer but was a payback method to michael cohen, that donald trump took that seriously and paid him check after check, one of which he brought to congress today and has president trump s signature. on top of all of that, all the lying and sneaking about the fact that the payment was made and that donald trump knew about it. you have testimony that says donald trump specifically toeld michael cohen to lie to a reporter and say donald trump knew nothing about the payment. you have the document. you have the fact of the payment. you have common sense. why would you pay the money without consulting with your client, and then the lies. in some ways the nail in the coffin is put all the other things out of your mind. why the lies? lie after lie after lie if you concorroborate it. it s not a good place for the president. cohen described times where
waited to see if mr. trump would comment and he refused to take questions and did put a tweet out before michael cohen testified what he did was bad things unrelated to trump and as we saw throughout the testimony all day long in washington, michael cohen was testifying that he did bad things very much related to donald trump. and so we re now bracing for the impact to see whether or not the president decides to weigh in and pose some kind of tweet before he has the sitdown meeting with the north korean dictator kim jong-un here in vietnam. they re expected to talk about the u.s. wish that north korea denuclearize. but all day long the president is going to be hearing questions about about michael cohen. he has a press conference at 4:00 hanoi time, 4:00 in the morning for you back in washington. and, wolf, i think it is unmistakable the president will be asked about the damning things that michael cohen testified. getting back to these bad things relates to the president, talking ab
there was no explicit direction from president trump but he felt he knew what the president wanted based on a sort of code that he understood over the decade or so that he worked for donald trump. how revealing was that to you? that s another example of what some people are growing tired of saying, and the first time it was said seemed shocking to say about the president of the united states and the people who he s assembled around him. it s the kind of thing you see in mob cases. it s the kind of thing you see in environments in which people do bad things but they don t want to be on the hook and on the record as asking someone to do a bad thing. it happens all the time. part of the testimony that was incredible to me that we haven t spent a lot of time on, you know, all day is because there s so many other things going on. at one point, michael cohen said in response to a question, how many times did donald trump have you, or did you believe donald trump wanted you to threaten some
been holding out hope for a pardon. he was on much better terms with the president. he now has no reason to believe that the president or anyone else can save him if he were to have been dishonest once again in his testimony today. i m really anxious from your perspective, the legal perspective, what jumped out at you today? i think fundamentally, the perjury issues potentially. based on cohen s testimony, of course, if it s true and can be corroborated somehow, the president has two major issues. the first is those answers that he gave to robert mueller. cnn has reported his written statements which are sworn statements, the president s statements, made two assertions. that he didn t know stone didn t tell him about those wikileaks ahead of times and no one told him about the trump tower meeting. he suspected that don junior would have told his father but he said he heard with his own ears roger stone on speaker phone telling donald trump about this release in advance. if either