Screengrab/New York Times
- President Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen said on Thursday that he has unearthed a decade’s worth of new information on old computers and telephones.
- This includes a hard drive with 14 million files on, he said.
- Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, said the information "has significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees" probing Trump.
- The existence of new information was revealed as Cohen seeks to extend the delay on starting his three year prison sentence for lying to Congress and campaign finance violations.
- In new documents submitted to lawmakers Thursday, Cohen claimed Trump instructed him to lie about a Trump Tower project in Moscow.
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Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, claims to have uncovered millions of files of new evidence that would be of interest to lawmakers probing alleged wrongdoing by the president.
In a statement Thursday night, Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said that his client’s "recent public and closed-door testimony to Congressional committees has triggered additional areas for investigation by law enforcement authorities and the Congress.
"In fact, Mr. Cohen has recently obtained a hard drive with 14 million files from his computers and phones over the past 10 years, which we believe has significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees."
Davis said in a letter to congressional Democrats, obtained by CNN, that his client should be given more time before his three-year jail sentence is due to begin on May 6.
"Mr. Cohen needs time, resources, and assistance to separate out privileged and personal documents from these 14 million files to make the rest available for review by various congressional committees," wrote Cohen’s lawyers, according to CNN.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
And in documents submitted to lawmakers by Cohen’s attorneys on Thursday, Cohen claimed that Trump told him to lie to Congress about when negotiations about a Trump Tower project in Moscow had ended.
Cohen said in February’s congressional testimony that Trump’s lawyers "reviewed and edited" his testimony to Congress in 2017, and testified that Trump "wanted me to lie" about the Trump Tower project. He did not previously claim that Trump explicitly directed his false testimony to lawmakers.
Trump’s attorneys and senior Republicans have accused Cohen of being a serial liar, who perjured himself when he told lawmakers in February he had sought no job in Trump’s White House.
A federal judge in December sentenced Cohen to three years in jail for lying to Congress about the planned Trump real estate project in Moscow, and violating campaign finance laws by making payouts during the 2016 election campaign to a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Trump, as well as tax evasion.
His sentence was originally set to begin in March, but the date was delayed so he could testify against Trump to Congress. He described the president as a "racist" and "conman" who had approved the hush money payments.
See Also:
- The arrest of a woman carrying a USB stick with malware into Mar-a-Lago exposes glaring flaws in the resort’s security, as FBI reportedly investigates whether she is a Chinese spy
- Ted Cruz doesn’t think Trump’s idea of shutting down US-Mexico border is a smart move: ‘The answer is not to punish Texas’
- Trump claimed wind turbines cause cancer, reigniting a long-running hate campaign against wind power with a weird conspiracy theory
Source: Business Insider – tporter@businessinsider.com (Tom Porter)