An attorney for Ivanka Trump was reportedly involved in reviewing Michael Cohen’s testimony before he appeared on Capitol Hill.
Vanity Fair reported Thursday that Abbe Lowell urged President Trump’s former personal lawyer to emphasize in his remarks in front of the House Oversight and Reform Committee that Ivanka Trump was not involved in a deal to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow.
{mosads}The negotiations over the Trump Organization’s now-defunct plans to build a luxury development in Moscow have become an area of concern for congressional investigators, with the extent to which the president and his family knew about the deal and how late into 2016 the plans continued have been hotly debated.
“Abbe asks for us to affirmatively address in our statement on the 25th,” reads one email exchange obtained by Vanity Fair between Cohen and his own attorney.
“[Ivanka] was not involved in the backs and forths with FS [Felix Sater] and MC [Michael Cohen],” the emails continue. “She was not in any meetings or calls with people putting it together.”
The only pushback Lowell received, according to Vanity Fair, centered around whether specific denials related to the president’s daughter would look “awkward” during Cohen’s testimony.
Cohen, who is awaiting the start of his own prison sentence for bank fraud and campaign finance violations, has also been convicted for lying to Congress in previous testimony about the Trump Tower negotiations and his own involvement.
Democrats earlier this year called for an investigation into whether the president told Cohen to lie about the project.
“The allegation that the President of the United States may have suborned perjury before our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote at the time. “We will do what’s necessary to find out if it’s true.”