Michael Cohen implicated Trump in at least 11 different felonies

Cohen said Wednesday that Trump implicitly told him to lie to Congress under oath about attempts to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign — a move that could potentially constitute the crime of suborning perjury. Perjury is traditionally viewed by the law as a crime that has to be proven explicitly.”Cohen said Trump’s personal lawyers “reviewed and edited” his statement to Congress in advance, including about the “length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive.” Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, issued a statement calling that assertion “completely false.” Cohen said his former boss directed him to organize hush-money payments during the campaign to women who claimed that they’d slept with Trump. This accusation isn’t new, and has been backed up by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, which wrote in a sentencing memo that Cohen committed crimes “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump.Cohen added fresh evidence on Wednesday in the form of a check signed by Trump that reimbursed Cohen for the payout to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who has said she had a brief affair with Trump in 2006.Many legal experts have already argued that Trump appears to be implicated in this one, including Lawrence Noble, former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission, who told The Washington Post: “There is little question Cohen, the campaign and the candidate are liable for the campaign finance violations.”Cohen said Trump knew exactly what he was giving Cohen money for: to silence the women and keep voters from finding out about Trump’s affairs. Cohen provided documents suggesting this creative claim allowed Trump to pump up his net worth from $4.6 billion in 2012 to $8.7 billion a year later.Trump’s attempt to buy the Bills didn’t succeed, and the loan was never made.“On its face, this certainly sounds like the contours of a bank fraud charge,” Levin said. “The Devil’s in the details, and there would have to be a lot of follow-up questions, but he’s certainly laying out the basis for further investigation.” Cohen also said Trump “deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”Ocasio-Cortez asked Cohen about a 2016 Washington Post article which noted that Trump’s financial disclosure forms valued his National Golf Club Jupiter in Florida at more than $50 million — even though his attorneys had gone to court the previous year to argue that, for tax purposes, the property was worth “no more than $5 million.” Explaining how the practice generally went down, Cohen said: “You deflate the value of the asset and then you put in a request to the tax department for a deduction.”A blockbuster investigation by The New York Times last October concluded that “President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud,” although the statute of limitations for criminal penalties for those decades-old incidents had expired. “There could be a conspiracy to cause false entries in the accounting of the Trump Organization by disguising hush-money payments as legal fees, and that could be the basis for separate charges in New York State,” Levin said.