Cohen adviser refuses to confirm or deny BuzzFeed report
An adviser for President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Friday refused to confirm or deny BuzzFeed News’s report that Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Neither deny nor confirm, we’re just not commenting on the story,” Davis said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Davis, speaking with host Chuck Todd, notably did not say anything to confirm or discredit the report.
“[Cohen] had nothing to do with the writing of the story. He didn’t initiate the story. It was done by independent reporting. So the story stands on its own,” he said.
{mosads}”You have, in the past, denied others or corrected the record when something has been wrong,” Todd said, citing a Wall Street Journal report published Thursday. John Gauger, director of RedFinch Solutions LLC and the chief information officer at Liberty University, told the Journal that Cohen hired a small polling firm during the 2016 election to rig two online polls in Trump’s favor and paid less than half of what was owed in cash.
Todd pressed Davis about corrections to BuzzFeed’s story, but Davis did not say anything to knock down or bolster the report.
“I’m going to just say read the story and the journalists have written about their sources and other corroborating evidence,” Davis said. “I can’t confirm anything, I have no independent evidence.”
Davis’s comments came one day after BuzzFeed News published a report late Thursday, citing two federal investigators who claimed that Cohen told special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump personally directed him to lie after his election about the timing of when negotiations involving the project ended in an effort to obscure the president’s involvement.
Trump took aim at Cohen on Friday, accusing his former lawyer and “fixer” of “lying to reduce his jail time.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed Giuliani, saying Friday the BuzzFeed report was “categorically false.”
Davis’s appearance on the show and recommendation that people read BuzzFeed’s report is likely to bring more attention to the story.