President Trump told his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about when negotiations ended on Trump Tower Moscow in order to obscure Trump’s involvement, according to a bombshell news report published Thursday night.
Two federal law enforcement officials told Buzzfeed News that Michael Cohen told the office of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about the lies after investigators gathered evidence from Trump Organization witnesses, internal company emails, text messages and other documents.
Cohen then admitted to the special counsel that, after the election, Trump personally told him to lie about the timeline of the condo project and say negotiations ended two months earlier than they did, the report claims.
These new revelations contradict statements Trump was publicly making about the deal at the time. In October 2016, Trump said he had no business deals with Russia. But Buzzfeed’s sources say Trump and his children, Ivanka and Donald Jr., were receiving regular updates from Cohen about the project. Trump had at least 10 face-to-face meetings with Cohen to hear updates about the potential deal, according to the Buzzfeed report.
They say Trump even backed Cohen’s plan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to speed-up negotiations. “Make it happen,” Trump told Cohen, according to Buzzfeed’s federal law enforcement sources.
In November, 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty lying about to Congress about when the deal ended. Cohen’s claims that negotiations ended in January, 2016 were an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1 in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations,” said special counsel Robert Mueller, referring to the investigation’s pseudonym for the president.
Felix Sater, a former Trump associate, previously said the Trump Organization considered his idea to offer Putin the $50 million penthouse in the skyscraper.
In light of the new report, some Democrats leaders are calling for an investigation and raising the possibility of impeachment.
“The allegation that the President of the United States may have suborned perjury before our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-California), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote on Twitter. [Buzzfeed] – Decca Muldowney