President Trump said in a new interview that people shouldn’t be allowed to escape longer jail terms by providing false information about others, which he said is what his former lawyer Michael Cohen did to him this week.
When asked in a new Fox News interview why Cohen would say Trump directed him to violate campaign finance laws, Trump said, “because he makes a better deal when he uses me, like everybody else.”
“This whole thing about flipping they call it, I know all about flipping for 30, 40 years after watching flippers,” Trump said. “Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is.”
“It almost ought to be outlawed,” he said. “It’s not fair, because if somebody’s giving you, spend five years like Michael Cohen, or 10 years or 15 years in jail … but if you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you’ll go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that.”
“It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump added. “You get 10 years in jail, but if you say bad things about somebody, in other words, make up stories if you don’t know… They just make up lies.”
[Related: Did Michael Cohen actually commit campaign finance violations? Some legal experts aren’t sure]
Cohen told the court that he was directed by Trump to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels to avoid problems with his presidential campaign in 2016. But Trump has said he didn’t know the details, and told Fox he only knew what happened “later on.”
Trump also said that because he paid Cohen back, the money didn’t come from his campaign, which means he didn’t violate campaign laws. Having the campaign pay Daniels, he said, would have been “a little dicey.”
Trump said he still respects his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort because Manafort didn’t tell lies to get a softer sentence.
“One of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that … you know they make up stories,” Trump said.
