Trump’s Recall of Moscow Deal Matches Cohen’s, President’s Lawyers Say

The latest criminal charges against Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime fixer, for lying about a Moscow hotel deal raised questions of whether Cohen created new legal risks for Trump or his family members by possibly contradicting what they told investigators about the same project.

The answer, at least according to the president’s lawyers and people close to his family, is no. Although Trump’s lawyers have long worried that special counsel Robert Mueller is trying to catch Trump in a lie, they said Cohen’s new account of the Trump Organization’s abortive hotel project in Moscow essentially matches what Trump himself stated in written answers delivered to prosecutors just nine days ago.

Cohen might have lied to authorities about aspects of the deal, as the complaint charges, they said, but the president did not.

“The president said there was a proposal, it was discussed with Cohen, there was a nonbinding letter of intent and it didn’t go beyond that,” said Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, who with others negotiated the president’s responses to Mueller’s questions for nearly a year. He said prosecutors did not raise certain details that Cohen now says he misled Congress about — including how long the hotel project stayed alive — and that the president did not volunteer those details.

According to the new documents released by the special counsel, Cohen lied when he told Congress last year that he had talked to Trump about the project only three times and that the proposal died in January 2016 — before the first primary in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. He also concealed his interactions with Russian officials and the fact that he asked Trump to travel to Russia to promote the deal because, he said, he wanted to support Trump’s “political messaging.”

Giuliani refused to disclose Mueller’s precise questions to Trump about the deal or exactly how the president responded. He said only that Trump and the Trump Organization, his company, provided the prosecutors “with every document about this from the beginning,” adding, “That’s the only reason they know about it.”

Notes by the president’s lawyers this year show that prosecutors were trying to scrutinize Trump’s business dealings in Russia during the campaign, including what he knew about the hotel deal that Cohen was pursuing with Felix Sater, another business associate.

“What interaction and communication did you have with Michael Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, regarding real estate developments in Russia during the period of the campaign?” Mueller’s team asked in a meeting with Trump’s lawyers, according to the notes.

Cohen’s new account of the hotel deal will inevitably be compared not only to the president’s, but also to those of Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, who testified repeatedly before congressional committees last year about that project and other matters. The complaint states that Cohen misled Congress about the fact that he had briefed Trump family members about the project. Although the family members were not named, a person familiar with the situation said Cohen discussed the deal with Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, the younger Trump said that he was only “peripherally aware” of the proposed venture to build a new Moscow hotel bearing the Trump name. Most of what he knew about it, he said, he had learned recently while preparing to testify. He told the committee that Cohen pursued the project in 2015 and told the House Intelligence Committee that the deal fell dormant as of June 2016 — an accurate date, according to Thursday’s court documents.

Lawyers for Ivanka Trump and her brother declined to comment on their interactions with Cohen over the hotel project. But people close to the Trump family said that while emails indicate that both of them were aware of Cohen’s efforts to get it off the ground in 2015, their involvement appears to end in January 2016. If Cohen tried to continue with the project after that, these people added, they did not know.

The president’s critics will also inevitably seek to learn whether he knew that Cohen, then still a trusted aide, falsely testified to Congress last year. Trump’s lawyers then closely monitored what witnesses like Cohen were telling the authorities through joint defense agreements with their lawyers, and are likely to continue to do so.

But even if the president knew that Cohen misled Congress, legal experts said, he is not in legal jeopardy as long as he did not ask Cohen to lie. And there is no allegation that he did so. The latest complaint, on its face, seems less worrisome for the president than the previous one lodged against Cohen in August, said Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official. In that case, Cohen directly implicated Trump in a crime, saying he instructed him to pay money to two women to cover up a potential sex scandal that he feared could endanger his presidential candidacy. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and a host of other charges for which he has yet to be sentenced.

The president lashed out fiercely at Cohen on Thursday, calling him a “weak” prevaricator who concocted a false tale about the hotel deal in hopes of winning a lesser punishment. That charge conflicts with Giuliani’s assertion that Cohen’s new version of the deal matched that of Trump’s to the special counsel.

Asked how he reconciled the seeming contradiction, Giuliani said it was impossible to square Cohen’s shifting accounts.

“He has so many different versions of the same stories, so by definition he is a liar and we can’t trust him,” Giuliani said. “Given the fact that he’s a liar, I can’t tell you what he’s lying about.