Former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno said Tuesday that President Trump’s recent tweets about the role of his former longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation make it look like the president is “tilting the scale” in his favor.
“For the chief executive to weigh in on active investigations and prosecutions, one way or the other, it looks unseemly,” Moreno told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.” “It looks like you’re sort of tilting the scale.”
Moreno added that his comment suggesting sitting presidents shouldn’t weigh in on active investigations also applied to former President Obama’s comments on the federal probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server.
“It was not President Obama’s finest hour, absolutely, for the same reasons. Perhaps it was not as in-your-face as a tweet, but that was also widely seen as a pretty inappropriate to weigh in on something that’s a very, very hot, active matter,” he said.
Trump on Monday tweeted that Cohen did not deserve leniency for cooperating in Mueller’s investigation, saying Cohen should get a “full and complete” prison sentence.
“Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.” You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018
….his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free. He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2018
Cohen had requested that a federal judge spare him prison time, partly because he said he lied to lawmakers in order “to support and advance [Trump’s] political messaging.”
Trump last week took aim at Cohen, calling him a “weak person” for pleading guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Organization’s efforts to build a tower in Russia, which never came to pass. The issue is a key part of Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.
However, Moreno said the tweets did not appear to be enough to build an obstruction of justice case.
“It doesn’t seem to me that you would take these tweets and build an obstruction of justice case,” he said. “It seems like that’s a big jump.”
— Julia Manchester
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