After being implicated in campaign finance violations by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump said during a Fox & Friends interview that aired Thursday morning that cooperating with prosecutors, as Cohen had, “almost ought to be illegal.” Members of Congress didn’t convey much support for the president’s idea.
“I’d spend a little less time being interviewed if I were him,” Tennessee Republican Bob Corker responded. “I would think the people around him cringe when they hear him say things like that.”
South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham was similarly dubious: “I don’t think it will be outlawed anytime soon.”
“It’s just the way the system’s worked since time began,” Graham added, before gracefully pivoting into a pitch for unrelated criminal justice reform: “But I think he’s got a chance to do some sentencing and prison reform. There are a lot of people in jail for nonviolent offenses.”
During the Fox News interview, Trump was more focused on Cohen’s breach of loyalty, though. “You get 10 years in jail … They make up things and now they go from 10 years to now they are a national hero. They have a statue erected in their honor. It’s not a fair thing,” Trump said, referring to Cohen’s plea deal, which includes three to five years in federal prison for counts of tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations.
“Part of process we have is where individuals who have been accused of wrongdoing will be offered deals by the prosecution,” South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Sometimes it seems frustrating to people on the outside looking in, but nonetheless that is the way the system has worked and that’s the way that it’s going to continue to work.”
Cohen testified on Tuesday that he made illegal campaign donations by paying off porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her allegations of an affair with Trump quiet during the 2016 campaign, “in coordination with and at the direction of” then-candidate Trump, with the intent of influencing the election. Cohen also worked alongside National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who bought the rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about an alleged affair with Trump, for the purpose of preventing its publication during the election cycle.
“Obviously Michael Cohen as a private citizen can say whatever he wants to say, but the courts have to establish whether it’s true or not,” said Oklahoma Republican James Lankford.
Cohen’s claims about Trump’s involvement in the payoffs may be bolstered by files, emails, text messages, phone records, and audio recordings seized when investigators raided his law office this spring, but that evidence has yet to be shared publicly. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, released one three-minute audio clip in June, in which Cohen and Trump appeared to discuss the McDougal arrangement during the campaign. The White House insists Trump did nothing wrong. (Read the many denials, lies, and shifting messages from the president and his allies since the payoffs were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.)
Other GOP senators avoided stepping on Trump’s toes. “I need to digest that and think about it,” Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn told reporters on Thursday. Asked which specific aspects of the issue he would consider when digesting Trump’s idea, Cornyn said that prosecutors “have responsibilities too, to see that justice is done, not just to convict.”
“That’s the definition of their job and so I think we need to be looking at that constantly to see if that right balance is being struck,” he added.
