Former White House aide and ex-reality TV star Omarosa Manigault Newman said Tuesday Michael Cohen’s guilty pleas could be the death knell of President Trump’s administration.
“Today changed everything. This is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump,” Manigault Newman said during an interview with MSNBC. “He knows that the person who knows everything about him, about his relationship with these women, and others people may not know about will come to light.”
[More: Wall Street Journal: Manafort, Cohen convictions show Trump ‘at his worst’]
“Today changed everything. This is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump … because he knows that the person who knows everything about him, about his relationship with these women and others people may not know about will come to light.” @OMAROSA on #Hardball. pic.twitter.com/pZCntnxhVl
— Hardball (@hardball) August 21, 2018
The hyped video Manigault Newman shared on the show was of Cohen boarding a purported Trump plane in September 2016. She said the footage was important in case the White House tried to reduce Cohen’s role in the campaign to “just a coffee boy.”
“He was very involved, he was directing some of the things that were happening, and he was impacting some of the decisions that the president made,” Manigault Newman said of Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal attorney and fixer.
She added campaign staffers were aware Cohen was arranging to pay off women claiming to have had extramarital affairs with Trump ahead of the election, including porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal.
“We all knew that this was going to be used as a hush money kind of payment from campaign finances,” Manigault Newman said. “And unfortunately, there are a lot of donors, a lot of people who gave to his campaign and expecting it would go towards the victory. But instead it was going to shut these women up and that is illegal.”
Cohen pleaded guilty before a federal court in New York on Tuesday to five counts of tax evasion from 2012 to 2016, one count of making a false statement to a financial institution, one count of willfully causing an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution.
While acknowledging the charges leveled against him by federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, Cohen told the court he had been directed to violate campaign law by a candidate for federal office, including paying $130,000 as part of a nondisclosure agreement, according to Bloomberg. He appears to be referring to Trump and Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
[Related: Stormy Daniels speaks out about Cohen guilty plea: Michael Avenatti and I are ‘vindicated’]
