Michael Cohen: Trump's former lawyer pleads guilty to lying to Congress over Russia investigation

Democrats say they will look to attach protections for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to an upcoming spending bill as Russia investigation inches closer to president

Donald Trump‘s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress over a Trump property deal in Moscow.

Cohen admitted making false statements as part of a plea deal his attorneys negotiated with special counsel Robert Mueller‘s team who are investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump campaign officials.

Cohen’s plea deal includes further cooperation with the probe and the guilty plea makes clear that prosecutors believe that Mr Trump, who insisted repeatedly throughout the campaign that he had no business dealings in Russia, was continuing to pursue the project weeks after he had clinched the Republican nomination for president.

According to court testimony, the president had discussed a potential development in Moscow as recently as June 2016 – the same month Mr Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr, met in Manhattan with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. Mr Cohen told Congress in behind-closed-door testimony last year that talks around that deal ended months before in January.

“I made these misstatements to be consistent with individual 1’s [Donald Trump] political messaging and out of loyalty to individual 1,” Cohen said in court.

His lawyer added: “Mr Cohen has cooperated. Mr Cohen will continue to cooperate.”

Court documents show that Cohen intentionally misled officials with his false testimony, and that he had done so with political interests in mind.

Cohen made false statements to “give the false impression that the Moscow Project ended before ‘the Iowa caucus and ... the very first primary’ in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations,” court documents filed in the US Southern District of New York said.

The documents also indicated that Cohen considered meeting with top Russian officials including Russian president Vladimir Putin, and that Cohen held discussions with individuals within the Trump Organisation about the best timing for a potential trip to Russia for Mr Trump, with emails showing they agreed that a trip after the 2016 Republican convention would be ideal.

The plea from the president’s former fixer is the latest sign that Cohen is cooperating with Mr Mueller’s probe and could be one of the most significant cooperating witnesses in the investigation. Cohen had pleaded guilty in August to eight criminal charges, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations, in a separate case brought by federal prosecutors in New York. His sentencing in that case is scheduled for 12 December.

During that plea Cohen said he had paid hush money to two women who alleged had affairs with Mr Trump, at the direction of “the candidate”, implicating Mr Trump.

The latest Cohen case was filed in New York a week after Trump and his lawyers provided Mr Mueller with responses to written questions. It was not immediately clear whether questions about the Russian Trump Tower real estate deal were among those answered by Mr Trump and his lawyers.

But a prior list of queries that Mr Mueller’s team presented to Trump lawyers this year did include a question about it, and Mueller’s team is known to have asked about Trump’s business dealings over the years.

Cohen has said that he plans on focusing on “family and country first” as opposed to his previous allegiance and “loyalty” to Mr Trump.

Mr Trump characterised Cohen’s plea deal as an attempt by his former lawyer to reduce his jail sentence. He said that Cohen was lying, and insisted that there would have been nothing wrong with him pursuing a business project in Russia during the campaign because he was running the Trump Organisation at the same time as he was running for president.

“I decided ultimately not to do it. There would’ve been nothing wrong if I did do it. If I did do it there would’ve been nothing wrong,” Mr Trump said before heading on a trip to the G20 summit in Argentina. He continued to call Cohen a liar, and suggested that he is a “weak person”.

Cohen has reportedly spent more than 70 hours speaking to investigators since that earlier plea in August, which implicated Mr Trump in potential campaign finance crimes. Those interviews have focused on a range of topics including contacts with Russian sources during the campaign, talk of potential presidential pardons, and the president’s business ties to Russia.

Democrats jumped on the news of Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday, with incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff saying that the disclosure makes it seem as though the president lied to the American people about his business dealings.

“If Mr Cohen misled the Congress about the president’s business dealings in Russia deep into the campaign, it also means that the president misled the country about his business dealings,” Mr Schiff told CNN.

Later, Nancy Pelosi, the leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, said her party would try to force protections for Mr Mueller into a must-pass spending bill if the House is not allowed to vote on a free-standing bill protecting him from potential political interference.

Republicans control the House and Senate until January, but they need some Democratic votes on the legislation to keep parts of the US government open beyond 7 December.

“The Congress must immediately pass legislation to preserve the Special Counsel investigation,” Ms Pelosi said in a statement.

“If Speaker Ryan refuses to take up that bill, House Democrats will fight to include language to protect the investigation in the upcoming must-pass spending bill,” she added.

Mr Trump has repeatedly denied his campaign colluded or coordinated with Russians in 2016, and has called the special counsel investigation a “witch hunt” on several occasions.

That attack on the Mueller investigation included a Thursday morning tweet storm in which he called the probe rigged, and suggested that a better use of time and resources would be to investigate his political rivals.

“Did you ever see an investigation more in search of a crime? At the same time Mueller and the Angry Democrats aren’t even looking at the atrocious, and perhaps subversive, crimes that were committed by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats,” Mr Trump tweeted. “A total disgrace!”

Mr Trump continued in that tweet storm to question whether the probe would ever end, and suggested that the investigation – which has not concluded, and for which a report has not been completed – had already proved that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.