Michael Cohen, the longtime lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, on Wednesday will tell Congress his former boss is a “conman” who indirectly told him to lie about business his real estate empire was seeking in Russia during the presidential race.
In an opening statement Mr Cohen will give to the House oversight committee, he will also accuse the former New York property mogul of being a “racist” and a “cheat”.
The testimony will come as Mr Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi for a second summit to discuss denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula.
He responded on Twitter, insisting Mr Cohen was “lying in order to reduce his prison time”. Mr Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress when he told lawmakers Mr Trump was no longer seeking to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 race, will tell the committee that he wanted to correct the record.
“The last time I appeared before Congress, I came to protect Mr Trump. Today, I’m here to tell the truth about Mr Trump,” he said in the statement published ahead of the Capitol Hill hearing, adding that negotiations about the Moscow project continued “for months during the [presidential] campaign”.
“Mr Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr Cohen said.
“In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.”
Mr Cohen added Mr Trump asked him about the status of the Moscow Tower project six times during the first half of 2016, when the Republican presidential primary was in full swing.
“Mr Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.”
