House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner is asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Michael Cohen after Donald Trump’s former “fixer” admitted in an ongoing civil fraud trial that he lied to Congress.
Cohen, the 77-year-old ex-president’s onetime lawyer, served a three-year prison term for lying in 2017 to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other crimes — and Turner (R-Ohio) says his freshly admitted untruth dating to 2019 before the House Intelligence Committee may warrant another prosecution.
Cohen testified at Trump’s New York fraud trial on Oct. 25 that “yes” he lied in February 2019 to the House panel — a crime punishable by up to five years in prison — when he said Trump didn’t ask him to inflate his personal financial statements.
Under oath before the committee, Cohen said: “Did he ask me to inflate the numbers? Not that I recall, no” — before testifying in court last month that Trump had done just that.
Cohen testified in the trial, “I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected … and my responsibility, along with [then-Trump Organization CFO] Allen Weisselberg, primarily, was to reverse engineer.”
Trump lawyer Alina Habba pressed Cohen on the inconsistency.
“Mr. Cohen, were you being honest in front of the Permanent Select Committee when you testified [in] February … 2019?” Habba asked.
“No,” Cohen said.
via joemiller