US President Donald Trump has said that he never told his private lawyer Michael Cohen to break the law and denied any ties to his crimes, a day after Cohen was sentenced to prison on charges that included hush money payments to women ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
“Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me,” Trump said in a series of Twitter posts, adding that Cohen wanted “to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did”.
Cohen, who once said he would “take a bullet for Trump,” was sentenced in New York on Wednesday to three years in prison after pleading guilty to orchestrating the payments that were part of the “dirty deeds” he did at the behest of Trump.
Federal prosecutors said that Trump ordered the payouts to protect his campaign from allegations of sexual affairs with an adult film actress and a Playboy model.
According to Cohen, the payments – which violated campaign finance laws – were designed to bury potential scandal at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign in which Trump surprised many by defeating his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
Trump faces growing political and legal risks from a months-long investigation into the payments by US prosecutors, which stemmed from the larger continuing federal probe into alleged Russian interference in the election and possible collusion by Trump’s campaign.
Justice Department policy is not to indict a sitting president but some legal experts have said that Trump could be charged after leaving office.
Democrats and other critics also have raised the issue of impeachment by Congress.
In his tweets, Trump said he had no role in Cohen’s actions.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law,” he said. “He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law.
“It is called ‘advice of counsel’, and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”
Trump has denied the affairs and argued that the payments to Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels were not campaign contributions.
Trump also has denied collusion with Moscow, and has repeatedly called Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt”.
Russia has also denied any interference.
Prosecutors on Wednesday also said the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid had struck a deal to avoid charges over its role in one of the payments made “in concert” with Trump’s presidential campaign.
Cohen, who also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Organisation building in Moscow, in court on Wednesday said that his “blind loyalty” led him to cover up for Trump.
He told the court that he had felt it was his “duty to cover up ... (Trump’s) dirty deeds”.
Cohen is the latest Trump associate to be swept up in Mueller’s investigation following Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates and former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, among others.
Trump has offered a shifting defence on the payments to the women, first saying in April that he did not know about the payments to later appearing to acknowledge that they were made but saying they were unrelated to campaign finances.
The affairs allegedly happened years before, so the timing of the hush payments right before an election raised questions.
In the case of McDougal, her story was deliberately buried by the publishers of the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper.
American Media Incorporated publishers said in their co-operation deal that they were paid to “catch and kill”, meaning they’d buy rights to embarrassing stories about Trump and then not publish.
In an interview with Reuters this week, Trump slammed Cohen for co-operating with prosecutors and said he was unconcerned about possible impeachment.
He also called any of his potential business dealings with Russia “peanut stuff”.