Michael Cohen is facing accusations that he may have lied to Congress during his testimony this week after a clip of a 2016 interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo resurfaced in which the former longtime lawyer to President Trump appeared to express interest in working for the White House.
Cohen told Cuomo in a November 2016 interview that he hadn’t been offered a job in the White House at that time but that he “certainly hope[d]” he would be. Asked if he would take such a job if it were offered, Cohen replied “100 percent.”
“Now, you just said something — ‘if I go to Washington,’ ” Cuomo says in the video.
“We’re trying to figure out who’s going to go,—” he continued, before Cohen interrupted to say he had not been asked.{mosads}
Cuomo later asserted that Cohen would be the “first person” Trump would want by his side in the White House.
“Chris, I agree with that. I have not been asked. You know I don’t lie,” Cohen responded.
Cuomo then pressed Cohen on whether there’s “a chance” that Cohen will be asked to join the White House team.
“If you were asked, you’d be on the political side not the governmental side, right? Cuomo asked.
“It would depend on the role that they’re asking me to play,” Cohen responded.
“It has to be a role that I feel comfortable with,” he added, before Cuomo interrupted to ask if there was a chance that Trump would ask Cohen to go to Washington.
“Oh, I certainly hope so,” Cohen said, adding that he would “one hundred percent” take a job if asked by the president.
Cohen has been accused of turning against Trump because he was not offered a job in his administration.
“That’s the point, isn’t it, Mr. Cohen, isn’t it? You wanted to work in the White House but you didn’t get brought to the dance,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Wednesday during Cohen’s hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
Cohen slammed Jordan’s allegation, testifying that he had never wanted to serve in the Trump administration.
“I was extremely proud to be the personal attorney for the president of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs,” Cohen said, adding that it was better for him to remain Trump’s lawyer in order to handle more sensitive matters.
Allies of the president have suggested that Cohen sought a White House position in the days since Cohen testified in an attempt to discredit his testimony as untruthful.
The president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., claimed on Twitter on Thursday that Cohen had lobbied many members of Trump’s inner circle to secure a spot as White House chief of staff, a position which initially was filled by Reince Priebus.
“Michael was lobbying EVERYONE to be ‘Chief of Staff.’ It was the biggest joke in the campaign and around the office. Did he just perjure himself again?” Eric Trump tweeted Thursday.
“Nailed it. It really was the biggest joke of the entire transition. The beginning of his bitterness was when he realized that was never going to happen,” Trump Jr. added in his own tweet.
Two of Trump’s top Republican allies on Capitol Hill are asking the Justice Department to investigate Cohen for perjury, accusing him of making intentional false statements during his public testimony this week.
“Mr. Cohen’s testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Reform … was a spectacular and brazen attempt to knowing and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to numerous material facts,” Jordan and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) wrote in a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Thursday. “His testimony included intentionally false statements designed to make himself look better on a national stage.”