Robert Mueller disputes report claiming Trump told Michael Cohen to lie to congress

BuzzFeed says it is standing by its reporting

Robert Mueller has issued a rare statement dismissing a news report that claimed Michael Cohen had informed prosecutors Donald Trump had told him to lie to Congress.

After Democrats seized on the report by BuzzFeed News and said they would open hearings into whether the president had indeed ordered his former personal lawyer to lie about a Trump Tower project in Moscow, the special prosecutor appeared to pour cold water on the story.

“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterisation of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr Mueller’s office, said in a statement emailed to the media on Friday evening.

Mr Mueller’s statement, one of just a handful that have been issued since he was appointed in May 2017 to investigate Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, was leapt on by Mr Trump and his supporters.

The president retweeted a comment posted underneath a post by BuzzFeed saying that it had updated its story with Mr Mueller’s comment. “Sadly so many will never get the memo that it was fake,” the person had written.

His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, tweeted: “I ask is that CNN gives equal time to the retraction....(um obliteration you got hit with from Special Counsel’s Office) that you gave to the #fakenews part of the story you all so desperately wanted to be true. Seems fair, right?”

The statement by Mr Mueller was issued several hours after Mr Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had issued a categorical denial of the claim.

“Any suggestion – from any source – that the president counselled Michael Cohen to lie is categorically false,” he said. “Cohen has traded on a pattern of lies and dishonesty over an extended period of time and he is going to pay a very, very serious price. Today’s claims are just more made-up lies born of Michael Cohen’s malice and desperation in an effort to reduce his sentence.”

On Thursday night, when the article was first published, Mr Giuliani, had said: “If you believe Cohen I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters of the claim: “Look, that’s absolutely ridiculous.”

At the same time, BuzzFeed News said it was was standing by its report.

BuzzFeed News’ editor-in-chief Ben Smith tweeted: “In response to the statement tonight from the special counsel’s spokesman: we stand by our reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the special counsel to make clear what he’s disputing.”

Cohen is due to show up to prison in March to serve a three-year sentence as part of the deal brokered last November in which he admitted arranging payments to Stormy Daniels and former model Karen McDougal – a breach of campaign finance laws – on the eve of the 2016 election.

During his guilty plea negotiation, Cohen, 52, admitted he lied when he told Congress in August 2017 that the Moscow Trump Tower project, an idea that dated back as far as 1996, had collapsed by the end of January 2016, when Trump was one of just many candidates seeking the Republican nomination.

In fact, it did not end until June 2016, by which point Trump was the only candidate still in contention, other than John Kasich.

“In truth and in fact, Cohen’s representations to the Senate select committee on intelligence and the House committee about the Moscow Project were false and misleading,” said a document filed by federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York.

BuzzFeed said the two sources had revealed Cohen also told special counsel Robert Mueller that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.