The president\u2019s latest defense comes as prosecutors continue to probe hush money payments made during the 2016 election.<\/b>
\nPresident 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 \u201cdid nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws\u201d and that the campaign finance crimes Cohen pleaded guilty to weren\u2019t 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 \u201cin coordination with and at the direction\u201d of \u201cIndividual 1,\u201d which is how Trump is identified in the court documents.
Trump pushed back in his Thursday tweets, saying that he never \u201cdirected Michael Cohen to break the law,\u201d 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\u2019t matter because no crime had happened.
\u201cCohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me, but he plead to two campaign charges which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty on a civil basis.\u201d Trump went on to say that Cohen only pleaded guilty out of a desire to embarrass the president and get a lighter sentence.
So, to sum up: Trump is claiming he didn\u2019t do anything wrong, and even if he did, what Cohen did (and pleaded guilty to) wasn\u2019t actually a crime.
Prosecutors, however, have said that the payments, which exceeded the limit for an unreported campaign donation, were made with the purpose of influencing the presidential election. And Cohen, during his sentencing, told the judge he took \u201cfull responsibility\u201d for each crime he pleaded guilty to, including those involving the president of the United States of America.
This is the latest attempt by Trump to explain away the hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign. Trump initially claimed he knew nothing about the payments, specifically the $130,000 paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Then, in May, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted on Fox News that Trump had repaid Cohen for the payments to Daniels that the president had previously claimed he knew nothing about \u2014 which Trump later confirmed on Twitter.
The president\u2019s story has changed multiple times throughout this saga; his tweets on Thursday are merely the latest iteration.
And despite Cohen\u2019s sentencing, the investigation appears far from over. (This investigation is run out of the Southern District of New York and is separate from special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s probe.)
On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said they\u2019d reached a \u201cnon-prosecution agreement\u201d with American Media Inc., the National Enquirer\u2019s parent company that was involved in the $150,000 payoff to the other women involved in the scandal, former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
As part of the agreement, American Media Inc. (AMI) admitted its role in the payment, which was intended to influence the election: AMI entered into a \u201ccatch and kill\u201d deal with McDougal in August 2016, where they paid her $150,000 and offered her a series of health columns in exchange for her silence about her alleged affair with Trump. The CEO of AMI, David Pecker, is a friend of Trump.
AMI is continuing to cooperate with prosecutors.
Recent reports also suggest that prosecutors are continuing to probe the involvement of the Trump Organization and Trump himself in the payments. Where that will lead is unclear, but the next step in the probe appears to involve the president himself.<\/p>\n