By Dan Good / New York Daily News
NEW YORK — Michael Cohen says “of course” President Donald Trump was aware that hush-money payments to two women ahead of the 2016 election were wrong — and that the secret payments were arranged due to Trump’s election fears.
“Nothing at the Trump Organization was ever done unless it was run through Mr. Trump,” Trump’s former lawyer told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in his first interview since being sentenced Wednesday for a range of crimes.
Cohen has admitted to arranging the payments to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
“He directed me to make the payments, he directed me to become involved in these matters.”
Cohen said he acted out of “blind loyalty” to Trump.
Cohen, 52, was given a three-year prison sentence Wednesday for a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” that includes the hush-money payments as well as bank fraud, lying to Congress and tax evasion.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” Cohen told Stephanopoulos. “I stood up before the world and I accepted the responsibility for my actions.”
Cohen also said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team — investigating the Trump campaign and administration’s Russia ties — possess a “substantial amount of information” that corroborates Cohen’s statements.
Prosecutors said Cohen worked “in coordination and at the direction” of Trump to pay off McDougal and Daniels, who both claimed to have had trysts with Trump a decade earlier, to keep them silent as Trump ran for president.
The payouts are violations of campaign finance law.
On the same day that Cohen was sentenced, the Southern District of New York announced it had reached a non-prosecution deal with American Media Inc., the publisher of National Enquirer, in which AMI “admitted that it made the $150,000 payment in concert with (Trump’s) presidential campaign, and in order to ensure that (McDougal) did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election.
“AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election,” SDNY prosecutors wrote.
Trump — who initially claimed he didn’t know about the payments — is now denying that they were campaign contributions and wrote on Twitter Thursday that he “never directed Michael Cohen to break the law.”
Cohen will report to prison on March 6.
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