President Donald Trump Wednesday mocked his former longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen a day after his guilty plea, calling his professional competence into question.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” the president tweeted Wednesday morning.
Shortly after the first tweet, the president expressed sympathy toward his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes Tuesday. Manafort served on the president’s campaign for nearly five months, serving in the highest ranking position of campaign chairman for much of that time, and overseeing the presidential campaign through the critical Republican National Convention in the summer of 2016.
Trump said Manafort, “unlike Michael Cohen,” did not “make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’”
The president’s tweets regarding Cohen are his first reaction since Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight counts and said that he made illegal campaign contributions “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” namely Trump.
While Cohen could potentially face years behind bars over the admission of guilt, the president contended in another tweet Wednesday morning that two of the counts to which he pleaded guilty don’t amount to crimes.
For more than a decade, Cohen was one of the president’s most ardent and loyal aides and the keeper of his secrets as his so-called fixer.
Soon after Cohen’s homes and office were raided by the FBI in April, the president declared on Twitter that “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” even as he also predicted that Cohen would remain loyal to him and “never flip.”
But in July, Cohen told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that his first loyalty was to his family and country, not the president.
“My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first,” he said.
The formerly close relationship between the two men further devolved in recent months after Cohen released an audio recording of him and then-candidate Trump discussing what Cohen’s lawyer has said is a payoff deal for Karen McDougal. Cohen has also said that Trump had advance knowledge of a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
