Trump news latest updates: President picks fight with attorney general Jeff Sessions after Michael Cohen's guilty plea
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Donald Trump's day of disaster is rapidly becoming one of the worst weeks of his presidency.
The White House is insisting the president has done nothing wrong in connection with the legal woes of his former personal attorney and says the leader is not the subject of criminal charges.
Mr Trump has accused Michael Cohen of lying under pressure of prosecution and says the hush money paid to two women who allege sexual encounters with the him years ago is not a campaign violation because the money did not come from campaign funds.
Instead, Mr Trump claimed he personally had made the payments, in an apparent effort to stem the crisis.
That argument stands in contrast to Mr Cohen's guilty plea to campaign finance violations that he says he carried out in coordination with Mr Trump.
Mr Cohen says he used shell companies to make payments for silencing former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
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Axios is reporting that Michael Cohen told lawmakers that he couldn't say that Donald Trump knew about the important meeting with Russians at Trump Tower.
That could significant undermine any leverage Cohen hopes to gain with the Mueller investigation, by implicating Trump in Russian collusion.
Here's the latest round-up on the last day-or-so's bizarre goings-on, via Associated Press.
US President Donald Trump has dug in to his denials of wrongdoing as his White House struggled to manage the fallout from allegations that he orchestrated a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of two women who say they had affairs with him.
Mr Trump tweeted "NO COLLUSION - RIGGED WITCH HUNT!" - a reference to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And he accused his former lawyer Michael Cohen of "making up stories" to get a "great deal" from prosecutors.
The president, in a Fox & Friends interview that aired on Thursday and was taped the day before, downplayed his involvement with Cohen, who worked for him for a decade, saying he was just a "part-time attorney" who had many other clients.
He also suggested that Cohen's legal trouble stemmed from his other businesses, including involvement with the New York City taxi cab industry, and that he decided to offer "lies" about Mr Trump to reduce his own legal exposure.
He then delivered a stunning broadside against suspects turning state's evidence and acting as a witness for the prosecution, a staple of the criminal justice system.
"It's called flipping and it almost should be illegal," Mr Trump said. "In all fairness to him, most people are going to do that."
Cohen pleaded guilty on Tuesday to eight charges, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in co-ordination with Mr Trump.
Behind closed doors, Mr Trump expressed worry and frustration that a man intimately familiar with his political, personal and business dealings for more than a decade had turned on him.
Yet his White House signalled no clear strategy for managing the fallout.
At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at least seven times that Mr Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges.
She referred substantive questions to the president's personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland.
Outside allies of the White House said they had received little guidance on how to respond to the events in their appearances on cable news.
And it was not clear the West Wing was assembling any kind of co-ordinated response.
In the interview, Mr Trump argued, incorrectly, that the hush-money payouts were not "even a campaign violation" because he subsequently reimbursed Cohen for the payments personally instead of with campaign funds.
Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
Cohen had said on Tuesday he secretly used shell companies to make payments used to silence former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election.
Mr Trump has insisted that he only found out about the payments after they were made, despite the release of a September 2016 taped conversation in which Mr Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing a deal to pay Ms McDougal for her story of a 2006 affair she says she had with Mr Trump.
The White House denied the president had lied, with Ms Sanders calling the assertion "ridiculous", but she offered no explanation for Mr Trump's shifting accounts.
As Mr Trump vented his frustration, White House aides sought to project a sense of calm.
Used to the ever-present shadow of federal investigations, numbed West Wing staffers absorbed near-simultaneous announcements on Tuesday of the Cohen plea deal and the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges.
Manafort faces trial on separate charges in September in the District of Columbia that include acting as a foreign agent.
That Cohen was in trouble was no surprise - federal prosecutors raided his offices months ago - but Mr Trump and his allies were caught off-guard when he also pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes, which, for the first time, took the swirling criminal probes directly to the president.
Both cases resulted, at least in part, from the work of Mr Mueller, who is investigating Russia's attempts to sway voters in the 2016 election.
Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, said on Wednesday that Cohen has information "that would be of interest" to the special counsel.
"There are subjects that Michael Cohen could address that would be of interest to the special counsel," Mr Davis said in a series of television interviews.
Mr Trump, in turn, praised Manafort as "a brave man", raising speculation the former campaign operative could become the recipient of a pardon.
Mr Trump told Fox that he had "great respect" for Manafort.
He contended the prosecution was an overreach by the Justice Department and he revived his criticism of the leadership of attorney general Jeff Sessions.
Manafort, Mr Trump says had tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Cohen, he refused to "break".
Ms Sanders said the matter of a pardon for Manafort had not been discussed.
Among Trump allies, the back-to-back blows were a harbinger of dark days to come for the president.
Democrats are eagerly anticipating gaining subpoena power over the White House - and many are openly discussing the possibility of impeaching Mr Trump - should they retake control of the House in November's midterm elections.
"I don't know how you can impeach somebody who's done a great job," Mr Trump said to Fox.
He continued: "If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor."
"Because without this thinking," said Mr Trump as he pointed to his head, "you would see, you would see numbers that you wouldn't believe in reverse."
Michael Cohen pleading guilty to eight counts of fraud and campaign finance violations could prove to have a much more damning impact for Donald Trump.
As NBC News investigative reporter Tom Winter pointed out, prosecutors claim to have evidence implicating the president in Mr Cohen’s payments to multiple women throughout the 2016 election.
The prosecutors write:
The proof on these [campaign-finance] counts at trial would establish that these payments were made in order to ensure that each recipient of the payments did not publicize their stories of alleged affairs with the candidate. This evidence would include:
Records obtained from an April 9, 2018 series of search warrants on Mr. Cohen’s premises, including hard copy documents, seized electronic devices, and audio records made by Mr. Cohen.
We would also offer text messages, messages sent over encrypted applications, phone records, and emails.
As the White House continues to grapple with the fallout from multiple scandals this week, Donald Trump appeared to be watching Fox News — and frustrating international allies.
After Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s segment on the South African government’s land seizures, the president tweeted that he had instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study” the matter.
That triggered a near-immediate response from South Africa, with the government’s official Twitter profile tagging Mr Trump and writing, “South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past."
Mr Trump has tweeted out a portion of his Fox and Friends interview in which he addresses his previous claim that the press is "the enemy of the American people".
The president sought to clarify the remark, saying only the "fake news" was a public enemy. He then estimated that 80 per cent of the press was fake news. He also referred to reporters at the New York Times as "crazed", and "like lunatics".
See the full clip below.
An employee of the National Enquirer has told the Washington Post the mood in their newsroom is "total embarrassment" after the paper was implicated in Mr Cohen's guilty plea.
The newspaper's publisher is accused of working with Mr Cohen to buy and bury at least one woman's story of an alleged affair with Mr Trump during the election. The Post has previously reported that Enquirer executives sent articles about Mr Trump to Mr Cohen ahead of publication.
Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer, is for some reason tweeting about Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential election to Mr Trump nearly two years ago.
Mr Giuliani urged the Department of Justice to "go after" Ms Clinton for her campaign's payments to an opposition research group, tweeting: "On your theory in Cohen plea it’s an illegal campaign contribution."
"Let’s go DOJ wake up. where’s the indictment. Clintons not above law," he added.
A good fact check from NBC News on Mr Trump's claim that his attorney's campaign violations were less serious than those committed by former President Barack Obama.
Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, said Mr Obama's 2008 campaign violations were "a small, technical paperwork error that people who were trying to get it right might make".
In Mr Trump's case, he said: “What Michael Cohen has admitted to doing is absolutely a crime."
An important update from Page Six on where Mr Cohen had dinner on Tuesday night, just hours after his guilty plea: Le Bilboquet, a pricey Upper East Side eatery.
The New York Post once called the French boîte the "snobbiest restaurant in New York". According to the Post, the restaurant is a favourite of A-listers like former President Bill Clinton, Jamie Foxx, and Hugh Jackman.
An observer told Page Six Mr Cohen “honestly seemed pretty relaxed, surprisingly.”
In the midst of all the turmoil at home, national security adviser John Bolton is in Geneva today, speaking with Russian officials in a follow-up to Mr Trump's summit with Vladimir Putin last month.
Mr Bolton told the AP that Russian officials hadn't mentioned Mr Cohen's guilty plea, adding that there was "no weakening of my position, no weakening of the United States, and no weakening of the Trump administration" as a result of the development.
The security adviser said discussions this morning touched on nuclear nonproliferation, Iran, North Korea, arms control, and issues in Syria and Afghanistan.
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