BuzzFeed News is standing by its report that President Trump directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, despite special counsel Robert Mueller issuing a rare statement to dispute it.
“We stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the Special Counsel to make clear what he’s disputing,” the website’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, said in a statement Friday.
BuzzFeed News published a bombshell report Thursday that alleged Trump had directed Cohen to lie in congressional testimony about his business dealings with Russia.
The report cited two federal law enforcement officials as its sources, without naming them.
“We’re not playing any games with that characterization,” Smith told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, saying he was aware of the identities of the two sources. “We’re really confident in these specific sources and in the story the reporters told.”
The report said Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump and son Donald Trump Jr. requested that Cohen negotiate a potential Trump Tower in Moscow and provide regular updates on the deal during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump then allegedly told Cohen to lie about the timing of the deal. The news outlet reported that Mueller’s office learned about Trump’s alleged request through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and other company communications and documents.
A spokesman for the special counsel’s office pushed back on the report a day later.
“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” Peter Carr said in a statement.
Journalist Ronan Farrow said he had declined to publish parts of BuzzFeed’s story “based on a source central to the story repeatedly disputing the idea that Trump directly issued orders of that kind.”
Note that the general thrust of Cohen lying to Congress “in accordance with” or “to support and advance” Trump’s agenda (per Cohen’s legal memo) is not in dispute. The source disputed the further, more specific idea that Trump issued—and memorialized—repeated direct instructions.
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) January 19, 2019
