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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Michael Cohen Testifies to Congress in Public Today; U.S.-North Korea Summit Begins Today; Aired 4:30-5a ET
Aired February 27, 2019 - 04:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[04:31:02] MICHAEL COHEN, FORMER ATTORNEY FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP: I'm going to let the American people decide exactly who's telling the truth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DAVE BRIGGS, CNN ANCHOR: Michael Cohen's jaw-dropping prepared testimony is out, just hours before he'll be under oath in public. Today on Capitol Hill, all eyes on your television today at 10:00 a.m.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Twenty fascinating pages of prepared testimony, folks.
Welcome back to EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.
BRIGGS: I'm Dave Briggs. 4:31 Eastern Time.
In just hours, President Trump's former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen goes before Congress to deliver bombshell testimony. CNN has obtained a copy of his prepared public testimony. And it is stunning.
Within the first few minutes, Cohen will say, quote, "I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist, he is a conman, he is a cheat."
ROMANS: His 20-page testimony includes a series of new and at times astonishing claims. He will testify that then candidate Trump was aware longtime adviser Roger Stone was in direct contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton's hacked e- mailed, quote, "In July 2016 just days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump's office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on speaker phone.
"Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that within a couple of days there would be a massive dump of e-mails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign. Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of, wouldn't that be great?"
BRIGGS: And here we have a spin-forward of just how important that Roger Stone trial will be. ROMANS: That's right.
BRIGGS: He will be on trial. He will be asked about these remarks. We don't know whether he will agree with this, whether he will pour cold water on it. But again, the line from the White House, the line from Republicans today at this hearing will be, this is a convicted felon.
ROMANS: Credibility.
BRIGGS: Who does not tell the truth and who lied before Congress once again. Credibility is a major problem.
ROMANS: This is someone who is close to the president 10 years. You know, 10 years -- maybe not the closest person to the president, but close to the president for 10 years. The president now trying to say he was one of my attorneys, unfortunately. But he was the president's fixer.
BRIGGS: Yes,
ROMANS: He was the fly on the wall for so many of these conversations that are so important to -- you know, to the investigation and to the legacy of this president.
BRIGGS: Ten years. Ten years is an awfully long time to work for someone.
Let's give you some context now in the president talking about WikiLeaks during the campaign.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAGGIE HABERMAN, NEW YORK TIMES WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Did you ever talk to him about WikiLeaks? Because that seemed --
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No.
HABERMAN: So you never had conversations with him?
TRUMP: No, I didn't. I never did.
HABERMAN: You never told him -- you never told him to -- or other people to get in touch with them?
TRUMP: Never did.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGGS: That, of course, not the campaign. That was 2019. But during the campaign, you remember the president talking so glowingly about WikiLeaks. Urging them on. Talking about how they're so wonderful.
ROMANS: Yes. Russia, if you're listening, too.
BRIGGS: Russia, if you're listening.
Well, despite advance word, Michael Cohen would not talk about Russia. In today's public testimony. It features heavily in his prepared remarks. Cohen claims the president pushed hard for that Trump Tower Moscow project all during the presidential campaign, while saying publicly he had no business in Russia. Cohen offers his explanation for why.
ROMANS: He will say, "To be clear, Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project."
BRIGGS: Cohen also set to testify extensively about hush payments to Stormy Daniels. When the president was directly asked about the money last year on Air Force One, he denied knowing anything about its source.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?
TRUMP: No, no. What else?
[04:35:02] UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Then why do Michael Cohen make this if there was no truth to the allegations?
TRUMP: Well, you have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael's my attorney and you'll have to ask Michael Cohen.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Do you know where he got the money to pay those women?
TRUMP: I don't know. No.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGGS: But Cohen will tell the House Committee on Oversight he paid, and that Trump wrote him a series of illegal reimbursement checks, quote, "He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair and to lie to the first lady which I did. Lying to the first lady is one of my biggest regrets. She is a kind, good person. I respect her greatly and she did not deserve that."
As for the question of collusion with Russia, Cohen says he has no direct evidence but has his suspicions. Cohen will say this today. "I remember being in the room with Mr. Trump probably in early June 2016 when something peculiar happened. Don Junior came into the room and walked behind his father's desk which is unusual on itself. People didn't just walk behind Mr. Trump's desk to talk to him. I recalled Don Junior leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying, quote, 'The meeting is all set.' I remember Mr. Trump saying, OK, good, let me know." ROMANS: Donald Trump Junior's testimony to the Senate Judiciary
Committee in 2017 refutes that. Question, "Did you go up and talk to your father about it? Trump Junior, no, I wouldn't have wasted his time with it. Trump Junior, I never discussed at all -- with him at all."
All right. Michael Cohen is prepared to call President Trump a racist under oath on national television. According to his testimony, Cohen will inform lawmakers Mr. Trump once told him that black people would never vote for him because they were, quote, "too stupid." And he's going to testify Trump once asked him if he could name a country run by a black person that wasn't a shithole? According to Cohen, Trump posed that question when Barack Obama was president.
Michael Cohen's testimony before the House begins at 10:00 a.m. Join CNN for live coverage and analysis all morning. We have much more coverage and analysis of these 20 pages of prepared testimony. He was behind closed doors yesterday. He has a credibility problem which he recognizes in his testimony, but that gives Trump allies some ammunition here.
BRIGGS: Look. We don't often tell you, you have to be sitting on your couch watching television at 10:00 a.m. but this, you must see or listen to on Sirius if you are in your car.
ROMANS: Yes. Chris Cillizza says this might be the most watched testimony ever, really.
BRIGGS: It will be pivotal. It will redefine this presidency if Michael Cohen is to be believed.
More coverage straight ahead here on EARLY START.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[04:41:55] BRIGGS: 4:41 Eastern Time. And President Trump finally making it to Vietnam. He never fought in the war there, receiving a medical deferment. And Michael Cohen plans to share a conversation he had with Mr. Trump about that deferment when he testifies. He is set to tell lawmakers, quote, "Mr. Trump claimed it was because of a bone spur. But when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment."
He finished the conversation with the following comment, "Do you think I'm stupid? I wasn't going to Vietnam." Cohen adds, "I find it ironic, President Trump, that you are in Vietnam right now."
ROMANS: You know, it's interesting also the president had said that -- I think on Howard Stern show, he said that his personal Vietnam was surviving in New York in his earlier years by not getting STD. You know, that --
BRIGGS: Yes. ROMANS: He'd made light of the entire Vietnam era. And now he is in
Vietnam, talking to Vietnamese officials. And actually just tweeting in the last hour or so, criticizing, you know, Dick Blumenthal who is a senator from Connecticut. He said this, "I've now spent more time in Vietnam than Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, the third rate senator from Connecticut. His war stories of his heroism in Vietnam were a total fraud. He was never even there. We talked about it today with Vietnamese leaders."
Of course, Dick Blumenthal was in the military. He exaggerated in his bio his claims about his service.
BRIGGS: Yes, he was dishonest.
ROMANS: In Vietnam. But the president got deferrals. I mean, I think Tammy Duckworth who is an Iraq war veteran, a senator from Illinois, right?
BRIGGS: Yes.
ROMANS: She calls him "Cadet Bone Spurs." The president. So this whole Vietnam issue with the president is interesting and multifaceted.
BRIGGS: Properly understanding the Vietnam War clearly not a strength of the president.
This is all kind of just chatter, though. The interesting question is -- when Cohen testifies.
ROMANS: Right.
BRIGGS: Is this political damage or is it legal damage?
ROMANS: Legal damage.
BRIGGS: It appears to be both if in fact did manage to be believed, if in fact Michael Cohen brings those documents, brings evidence, brings signed checks, it could be both political and legal damage for the president.
ROMANS: Michael Cohen here, what he's going to claim today is criminal conduct by the president while in office. And that's what -- is the headline here.
Yesterday, Cohen was grilled by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors. Nine hours. Multiple sources familiar with the interview telling CNN he apologized for lying during his 2017 testimony. Here's what Cohen told reporters as he left the building.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COHEN: I really appreciate the opportunity that was given to me to clear the record and to tell the truth. And I look forward to tomorrow to being able to -- in my voice, to tell the American people, my story, and I'm going to let the American people decide exactly who is telling the truth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: The committee's ranking Democrat, Virginia's Senator Mark Warner, wouldn't discuss details of Cohen's testimony but did suggest the stakes are sky high.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[04:45:02] SEN. MARK WARNER (D-VA), RANKING MEMBER, SENATE INTEL COMMITTEE: Two years ago when this investigation started, I said it may be the most important thing I'm involved in in my public life in the Senate. And nothing I've heard today dissuades me from that view.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGGS: OK. A high-profile Trump ally in Congress, evidently threatening Michael Cohen, on the eve of his public testimony. Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida, who's been called the Trumpiest congressman in Washington, tweeting, "Hey, Michael Cohen, do your wife and father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Well, maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot."
Folks, this is a United States congressman, just to give you a little context. There are law professors in this country, dozens of them who say this is textbook witness tampering. This is a stunning sweet from a United States congressman. We sometimes forget where the bottom is because we keep going lower.
ROMANS: One of those. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeming to reprimand Gaetz, insisting comments like this make it harder for committee's to get truthful information. Gaetz, first he stuck to this, right?
BRIGGS: Yes.
ROMANS: And then his spokesperson --
BRIGGS: He was unapologetic.
ROMANS: Yes. Yes.
BRIGGS: Initially.
ROMANS: He stuck to this then finally issuing an apology, sort of, deleting the first tweet and posting a new one. "While it is important to create context around the testimony of liars like Michael Cohen, it was not my intent to threaten as some believe I did."
Certainly looked like a threat.
BRIGGS: It certainly looked like an effort to intimidate a witness. It was a stunning tweet. And again his spokesman first came out and said the tweet speaks for itself.
ROMANS: Right.
BRIGGS: He also gave an interview before that apology. He was totally unapologetic for it. Perhaps Kevin McCarthy or someone on leadership got to him and realized hey, we have to do something to clean this up.
ROMANS: And our Gloria Borger made a very good observation that the president -- this is a very close ally of the president. And one wonders if he did this on his own or if this was a discussion, some bigger discussion of the sort of threat to Michael Cohen. A fascinating development there but he tried to walk it back, I guess.
All right. 47 minutes past the hour. Much more on this 20 blockbuster pages of testimony that we have here and this testimony from Michael Cohen that begins in just hours.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[04:51:49] BRIGGS: Welcome back to EARLY START. 4:51 Eastern Time. As for the question of collusion with Russia, Michael Cohen, President Trump's former personal attorney, says he has no direct evidence, but has his suspicions.
Cohen will say this today, quote, "I remember being in the room with Mr. Trump probably in early June 2016 when something peculiar happened. Don Junior came into the room and walked behind his father's desk which is unusual on itself. People didn't just walk behind Mr. Trump's desk to talk to him. I recalled Don Junior leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying, quote, 'The meeting is all set.' I remember Mr. Trump saying, OK, good, let me know."
ROMANS: Donald Trump Junior's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 has a different story at that time. Question, "Did you go up and talk to your father about it? Trump Junior, no, I wouldn't have wasted his time with it. Trump Junior, I never discussed it with him at all."
And this is so key, the context of that meeting and the different versions of what happened.
BRIGGS: Yes.
ROMANS: That the president knew about it.
BRIGGS: And again, it's a meeting with Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. This one, though, will come down to who do you believe. Do you believe Michael Cohen? Do you believe Donald Trump Jr.? There will be no evidence of that. There will be no document to prove one way or another.
Now as to who you believe when it comes to Donald Trump you have to always talk about the context that he has said more than 8,000 fall and-or misleading statements during his presidency according to an ongoing count by the "Washington Post." That's 8,000 plus. ROMANS: All right. President Trump getting ahead of Cohen's
testimony with a tweet Cohen and his credibility from every direction, tweeting, "Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me unfortunately. He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the state's Supreme Court for lying and fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time. Using Crooked's lawyer." He's talking about Lanny Davis, someone who has worked for Hillary Clinton in the past.
BRIGGS: Yes. And so again back to that point. One liar versus another. Who is America going to believe? That's why it's important that today's public, you can sit there, you can judge his credibility. A lot of that will come down to the political, what Democrats in the House do with this in terms of do you believe Michael Cohen.
Now the other element is the special counsel and the SDNY investigation and what evidence does Michael Cohen present to them that could change all of this.
ROMANS: And he will be bringing -- he will be bringing evidence today. He will bring a signed check. He has got copies of financial statements. He has got -- he lays out what he says is evidence of this president has known about or conducted criminal conduct while in office.
BRIGGS: Yes.
ROMANS: That is the crux of his testimony.
BRIGGS: And while we've pointed out several times that Michael Cohen is a convicted felon and a proven liar to the Senate Intelligence Committee the first he testified, you have to recall the point that right now, the one thing Michael Cohen wants is to not only to clear his record and to tell the truth. But to try to reduce his sentence.
If he is proven to be lying again to Congress, there is no chance of any reduced sentence, so if he tells the truth here and provides some documentary evidence, perhaps there's a reduced sentence coming.
[04:55:05] So he has every reason to be honest now and every reason not to lie, given that the special counsel, given that the SDNY has proof.
ROMANS: All right. More on what he's going to say today in this testimony. Michael Cohen is prepared to call President Trump a racist under oath on national television. According to his testimony, Cohen will inform lawmakers Mr. Trump once told him that black people would never vote for him because they were, quote, "too stupid." He's going to testify Trump once asked him if he could name a country run by a black person that wasn't a, quote, "shithole."
According to Cohen, Trump posed that question when Barack Obama was president.
BRIGGS: Again, another story that will involve no proof. Just what one man says against another. How will the voters decide what to do with this? Clearly, the president does not have great numbers with the African-American community but does constantly point to what he's done in terms of raising that unemployment rate for the black community to a record mark. He has tweeted about that numerous times over the last couple of years.
ROMANS: The bottom line here is that Michael Cohen will say today on the record, under oath, there for the American people to see that the president of the United States is a racist, a conman and a cheat. He will bring documents with him, financial documents with him showing what he says are the extent of the president's misdeeds. He's going to talk about the Moscow Trump Tower project, something the president said that when he was running for president he was uninvolved in any of this.
Michael Cohen is going to say that, you know, this is a president who was aggressively pursuing business interests and -- for profit with Russia at the time he was also running for president. And he's going to detail all kinds of other malfeasance during the election. In part because he says the president didn't --
BRIGGS: Yes.
ROMANS: They didn't think he was going to win.
BRIGGS: And we've heard that story from numerous sources. We've heard that in some of the books about the president that he did not intend to actually win this thing, so he thought, I'm going to get all the business I can accomplish during this campaign and because of this campaign, while I can. That's where you bring back that story, and I can't recall the book at the moment, where when they won, there was this stunning feeling in the room and kind of an oh, no, what just happened moment for them.
But again a lot of this will come down to the political on one side, the legal on another. We will have Elie Honig who -- an experienced attorney, can weigh in on the legal aspects of this and what could change the presidency.
Let's be clear. If in fact Michael Cohen is to be believed today will, without question, redefine the Trump presidency in the years we have ahead.
ROMANS: Right. His testimony begins at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. We've got more analysis of what Michael Cohen, the president's former fixer, is expected to say this morning when EARLY START continues.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
COHEN: I'm going to let the American people decide exactly who's telling the truth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Michael Cohen's jaw-dropping prepared testimony is out just hours before he'll be under oath in public.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.
BRIGGS: I'm Dave Briggs. It is Wednesday, February 27th. 5:00 a.m. in the East. It is an extraordinary day in the news. And in the stunning split screen, Christine, with the president over in Vietnam about to meet with Kim Jong-un to try to reduce their nuclear weapons, denuclearization on the peninsula. At the same time, a stunning testimony about to be delivered by Michael Cohen.
ROMANS: Absolutely. Absolutely. The split screen is fascinating. The president clearly unnerved by it because he's been tweeting about it already this morning.
BRIGGS: Yes.
ROMANS: He's clearly on the world stage and very focused on what's happening on Capitol Hill.
BRIGGS: The question many will have is will the president be willing to accept less from North Korea to change the news cycle back here given all of this.
And just hours President Trump's former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen goes before Congress to deliver bombshell testimony. CNN has obtained a copy of his prepared public testimony. And folks, it's stunning. Within the first few minutes, Cohen will say, quote, "I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat."
His 20-page testimony includes a series of new and at times astonishing claims. He'll testify that then candidate Trump was aware longtime adviser Roger Stone was in direct contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton's hacked e-mails. Quote, "In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump's office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange, and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that within a couple of days there would be a massive dump of e-mails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.
