The president’s latest defense comes as prosecutors continue to probe hush money payments made during the 2016 election.
President Donald Trump defended his role in the illegal hush money payments made by his former attorney Michael Cohen in a series of tweets on Thursday morning. Trump claimed he “did nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws” and that the campaign finance crimes Cohen pleaded guilty to weren’t even actual crimes.
The Thursday morning tweets came after a federal judge sentenced Cohen to three years in prison on Wednesday for various crimes, including campaign finance violations involving payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
Prosecutors have alleged that Cohen made the payments with the intention of influencing the election, and that he did so “in coordination with and at the direction” of “Individual 1,” which is how Trump is identified in the court documents.
Trump pushed back in his Thursday tweets, saying that he never “directed Michael Cohen to break the law,” and blamed Cohen for not knowing the law.
The president also said he did nothing wrong with respect to campaign laws, but then suggested that campaign laws didn’t matter because no crime had happened.
