Cohen Now on Tape Trying To Walk Back Parts of Guilty Plea Now That Everything Crashed & Burned
Michael Cohen’s story has changed again.
The former private attorney for Donald Trump, who once told Vanity Fair he would “take a bullet” for the president, apparently didn’t mean it, because he then turned around and disavowed Trump in front of the House of Representatives with a Clinton-confidant lawyer by his side.
And that was after he pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress, allegedly on behalf of Trump.
Now, facing a sentence of a three-year prison term after pleading guilty for tax evasion, Cohen has been recorded denying he committed some of the very crimes he pleaded guilty to.
Cohen was recorded in a private telephone call on March 25 by anti-Trump actor Tom Arnold saying his guilty pleas in August to charges of tax evasion and committing bank fraud to obtain a home equity line of credit (or “HELOC”) were false, according to The Wall Street Journal.
At his sentencing in December, Cohen said, “I take full responsibility for each act that I pled guilty to,” according to The Journal.
That story has apparently changed, too.
“There is no tax evasion,” Cohen said on the call to Arnold, according to The Journal. “And the HELOC? I have an 18 percent loan-to-value on my home. How could there be a HELOC issue? How? Right? … It’s a lie.”
According to The Journal, Cohen didn’t know he was being recorded at the time of the conversation.
Arnold, who gave the recording to the newspaper, told The Journal he made the recording because Cohen “tapes everything and I wanted to remember what we talked about.”
He also said he made the call to Cohen to give the attorney “moral support,” as The Journal put it.
Clearly, Arnold’s idea of moral support — which apparently includes surreptitiously recording the supportive conversation and then leaking the contents of it to one of the largest news organizations in the world — differs from what most people think of as “moral support” by a considerable margin.
But that’s between Cohen and Arnold (and maybe The Journal’s more than 1 million readers).
What interests the rest of us about this conversation is how flimsy it shows Cohen’s word to actually be.
After bragging to the world about his loyalty to Trump, he proved that he had no problem stabbing the president in the back in front of Trump’s most ferocious political enemies.
It was done in an effort to save his own skin after everything crashed and burned around him.
Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, he’s been recorded saying his own guilty plea was a lie, which means Cohen has not only admitted to lying to Congress in a separate proceeding, he has, in a sense, admitted to lying to a court, too.
His attorney, the aforementioned Clinton confidant Lanny Davis (who has his own problems with honesty), issued a statement to The Journal that didn’t really say whether Cohen was telling the truth this time:
“Michael has taken responsibility for his crimes and will soon report to prison to serve his sentence. While he cannot change the past, he is making every effort to reclaim his life and do right by his family and country. He meant no offense by his statements.”
OK, he meant no offense, but was it even close to veracity?
Given his record, of course, it’s entirely possible that it’s true Cohen was lying to the court as part of some kind of a plea arrangement (that might make it less legally culpable, it doesn’t make it any less of a lie).
On the other hand, it’s just as likely he was lying again to Arnold, for reasons that only Michael Cohen knows.
Either way, it’s a solid bet there’s a lie at the bottom of it somewhere.
When it comes to Michael Cohen, it seems, that’s the only part of the story that never changes.
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