Michael Cohen’s former attorney Lanny Davis said on Friday that former President Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than face impeachment, had more respect for the Constitution than President Trump does.
“Nixon respected the Constitution. I don’t think this man even understands the Constitution,” Davis told Hill.TV’s Jamal Simmons.
“He was a lawyer who respected the Constitution. He did not defy the court order to turn over the tapes. He did not say the Justice Department is my law firm. He tried. He fired everyone and recognized you can’t get away with that,” he continued. “So Richard Nixon at least respected the Constitution. He deserved to be removed from office, but he at least understood the Constitution.”
“What scared Michael Cohen, scares me, and scares a lot of Americans, even those that didn’t much like Hillary Clinton and didn’t vote for her, is that [Trump] is a man who doesn’t care about the boundaries of the rule of law and our Constitution,” he said. “He doesn’t care about lying, we know that, and that’s frightening.”
Davis’s comments come after Cohen was sentenced on Wednesday to three years in prison for a series of crimes he committed while working for Trump.
Cohen says Trump pushed him to make payments to two women — former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels — to block them in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign from talking about their alleged affairs with Trump more than 10 years ago.
Cohen, who is cooperating in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling and any possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow, told ABC News that Mueller’s team told him his testimony had been found to be “credible.”
“The special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them was credible,” Cohen said in an interview that aired Friday. “There’s a substantial amount of information that they possess that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.”
— Julia Manchester
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