The View’s Meghan McCain peppered Michael Cohen with questions about why he decided to turn against President Trump during his appearance on the show on Monday.
McCain, a conservative host on the ABC show, began her line of questioning toward the president’s former personal attorney by asking if he was lying about the details in his new memoir, titled Disloyal, that reflect poorly on Trump and questioned why people should believe him given he spent time in prison after pleading guilty to criminal charges in 2018.
“Now that you’re switching sides and switching narratives, and you’re now telling me that Trump’s a bad dude, why should I believe that? Because I don’t easily swallow my initial instincts on people, and a liar is a liar is a liar,” she said. “So why aren’t you lying now?”
In response, Cohen invoked McCain’s late father, Sen. John McCain, but avoided answering the question directly. McCain repeated, “What made you change your tune other than money? And why should I believe you because you’re an admitted liar?”
“Well, okay. You do have to look at what the lies were all about. They were at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump. I’ve said that since day No. 1,” Cohen said, noting that he’s a registered Democrat.
“I think it was really my daughter, who recently had an article about her in Vanity Fair, and she was even on CNN this morning,” Cohen explained. “I was suffering from what she termed Stockholm syndrome. My need to please him, very much like 38% of the population right now, was greater than my ability to control my own moral compass, and again, when talking about the lies, we were talking about, you know, my statements to Congress about whether or not I spoke to Donald Trump about a failed real estate project in Moscow three times or 10 times.”
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to Congress about a planned Trump Tower project in Moscow as well as charges of tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations for hush money payments to two women during the 2016 campaign who claimed to have had affairs with the president. Trump has denied those relationships.
Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in December 2018, is serving the rest of his three-year sentence in home confinement. He was briefly sent back to prison in July following a release in May due to concerns related to the coronavirus.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany reacted to Cohen’s new book by saying it is full of “lies,” and attacked Cohen’s credibility.
“Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it’s unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies,” McEnany said in a statement.
