President Trump’s former longtime attorney Michael Cohen told a House panel this winter that another Trump lawyer encouraged him to falsely claim to Congress that negotiations to construct Trump Tower Moscow concluded in January 2016, The Washington Post reports. According to transcripts released Monday night from his testimony to the panel during closed-door hearings, Cohen said Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow prompted him to make the false claim in a 2017 statement to Congress—even though talks on a Moscow tower continued into June 2016, when it was already known that Trump would be the GOP nominee. House Democrats are now examining whether Sekulow or other Trump attorneys helped to shape that 2017 testimony. Cohen has previously admitted to making false statements to help conceal that the possible Russian project meant Trump could have had hundreds of millions of dollars at stake while he was running for president. Cohen is serving a three-year sentence for lying to Congress as well as for financial crimes and violating campaign-finance rules.
