Michael Cohen, the convicted liar and disbarred former lawyer to President Donald Trump, will accuse Trump of being a “racist,” a “conman,” and a “cheat” when he testifies before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday.
Politico obtained an advance copy of Cohen’s statement, and published it online Tuesday. Excerpts include:
I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist.
He is a conman.
He is a cheat.
He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.
…
Mr. Trump is an enigma. He is complicated, as am I. He has both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself.
…
A lot of people have asked me about whether Mr. Trump knew about the release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of time. The answer is yes.
…
Mr. Trump is a racist. The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and bigots. You have heard him call poorer countries “shitholes.”
In private, he is even worse.
He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a “shithole.” This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States.
While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way.
And, he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.
(Read the full statement here.)
Cohen also plans to testify about Trump’s alleged involvement in a “hush money” payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, and will claim Trump knew about an infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.
Cohen will also say that “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress,” but that he insinuated that Cohen should lie, a year before he could have known Cohen would testify to Congress, by stating allegedly untrue things.
One of Cohen’s attorney is Lanny Davis, is a close associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and has published a book asserting that Hillary deserved to win the 2016 presidential election and Trump should be removed from office.
Cohen pleaded guilty earlier this year to lying to Congress, among other crimes, and was expelled from the New York State Bar. He will begin serving a three-year prison sentence May 6. He has reportedly offered to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the 2016 election, but appears to have no agreement with Mueller.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.