President Donald Trump insisted Friday that he did not know in advance about a meeting at Trump Tower between his son, campaign aides and a Russian lawyer held to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
“(No,) I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.,” Trump tweeted of the infamous June 2016 powwow.
“Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?),” he said, referring to his former “fixer” and confidant’s ownership of New York City cab medallions that the feds reportedly are examining.
“He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!” he added about Lanny Davis, the former special counsel to the former president.
On Thursday, CNN reported that Cohen claimed that then-candidate Trump had prior knowledge of the Trump Tower sitdown and is willing to assert that claim to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani attacked Cohen as a “pathological liar,” saying the president did not know of the meeting.
“He cannot be believed,” Giuliani told Reuters on Thursday, referring to Cohen.
“If they rely on him … it would destroy whatever case they have,” he added, referring to Mueller’s investigation.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., along with son-in-law Jared Kushner and senior campaign aide Paul Manafort, attended the meeting with Kremlin-linked lawer Nataliya Veselnitskaya.
Trump Jr. told investigators from the Senate Judiciary Committee in September that he did not tell his father about the meeting beforehand, according to documents released by the committee.
Cohen is under criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York because of his business dealings.
The FBI raided Cohen’s Rockefeller Center office and his Park Avenue hotel room in April, seizing business records, including documents related to a hush payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election — a possible violation of campaign finance law — to keep mum about an alleged decade-old sexual liaison with the president.
On Friday, Trump also lashed out at Mueller in reaction to the news that the special prosecutor has been reviewing the president’s Twitter feed as part of the probe into obstruction of justice.
“Arrived back in Washington last night from a very emotional reopening of a major U.S. Steel plant in Granite City, Illinois, only to be greeted with the ridiculous news that the highly conflicted Robert Mueller and his gang of 13 Angry Democrats obviously cannot find Collusion…,” Trump tweeted.
“(The) only Collusion with Russia was with the Democrats, so now they are looking at my Tweets (along with 53 million other people) – the rigged Witch Hunt continues!”
The New York Times reported Thursday that Mueller was looking at the president’s critical postings about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and fired FBI Director James Comey.
With Post wires
