President Donald Trump’s former attorney and well-known pitbull Michael Cohen said Wednesday that Attorney General Bill Barr has taken the helm as the President’s fixer.
When asked by CNN’s Alisyn Camerota in interview on Wednesday who had replaced him in the infamous role, Cohen said unhesitatingly that it was Barr and also mentioned another Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
While Barr has shielded the President from detractors, paraded and defended Trump’s law and order campaign message and actively participated in efforts to raise doubt about the integrity of the November presidential election, Giuliani has gone further — doing Trump’s bidding abroad to meddle the results of the 2020 election. Earlier this month, a Ukrainian parliamentarian who provided Giuliani with information intended to smear Joe Biden was sanctioned as “an active Russian agent for over a decade,” by the Treasury Department.
“What a terrible shame, taking an illustrious career and throwing it right down the toilet, all for what?” Cohen said of Barr, adding: “I don’t know why most of these Republicans refuse to stand up when they know fundamentally what he’s saying is a lie, they know morally it’s wrong and they just go along with it.”
Earlier in the interview Cohen described his own actions to defend and shield Trump as fitting of a “sycophant” — cleaning up all the messes trailing behind a “con man.”
In his memoir released earlier this month, Cohen said he had once been Trump’s “designated thug.” Cohen spent years as a Trump confidant and continues to serve a three-year sentence in home confinement for felony convictions that involved lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws as part of a hush money scheme to keep a porn star and a former model quiet about an alleged Trump affair.
In Wednesday’s interview Cohen repeated earlier warnings that he believes the President will find a way to claim victory.
“When he ultimately loses because all the ballots come in, assuming that they’re properly counted, then he’s going to contest it,” Cohen said. “He’s got Attorney General Bill Barr that’s sycophant number one,” Cohen told Camerota.
The former Trump lawyer recalled previous remarks from President Trump, presumably with regard to Russian President Vladimir Putin, when Trump, Cohen claims, suggested, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for. All that matters is who’s counting the vote.”
“I think he idolizes Vladimir Putin,” Cohen said.
Last week, Cohen told CNN’s Don Lemon that Trump wanted to become “the dictator of the United States of America.”
Trump has repeatedly pushed the notion of a third term while he makes an effort at chipping away the integrity of November’s election.
“We are going to win four more years,” Trump said at a rally in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, last month. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”
The President has been mired in a battle to shield his tax returns from public view since the early days of his 2016 campaign. The Supreme Court recently ruled against Trump as part of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. efforts to obtain eight years of Trump’s personal and business returns and other financial records as part of his Trump Organization investigation, birthed out of the hush money scheme.
Cohen suggested that the reason Trump has worked so hard to keep his tax returns private is because the President’s wealth is “not as significant” as he claims and his tax deductions were “probably very lenient.”
“His biggest fear is that if in fact that tax return is released, that there’s a whole slew of organizations — of accountants and forensic accountants — that will rip through it and he will end up with a massive tax bill, fraud penalties, fines, and possibly even tax fraud,” Cohen said.
