Cohen: “Trump is a racist”

US President Donald Trump spoke out against damning allegations from his former lawyer and trusted adviser, Michael Cohen, accusing him of lying to lessen his own jail time, in his testimony before the House of Representatives, in which he claimed he had been witness to crimes committed by the current US President, even during his time in the White House.

Despite being halfway around the world, Trump didn’t stay quiet on the subject, which was ongoing whilst his summit with the leader of North Korea was failing in Vietnam. “I haven’t seen much of it, I was a little busy”, said the president, but he’d gleaned enough to assert that Cohen had lied “95% instead of 100% of the time” in his testimony. Donald Trump played on the previous convictions against Cohen, emphasising that it was difficult to trust testimony from someone who had lied to Congress, and been convicted of doing so, before.

Trump only agreed with one aspect of the statements from his ex-lawyer: “He lied a lot, but it was very interesting, because he didn’t lie about one thing. He said no collusion with the Russian hoax”. Cohen said, in his statement, that he had no awareness of coordination between the Trump campaign team and the Kremlin, in the run-up to Trump’s winning of the 2016 presidential elections that led Trump to the White House.

“Loyalty to Trump has cost me everything,” began the lawyer, calling the US President a “racist and a conman” in his opening statement, saying that he threatened up to 500 people on his behalf in the course of ten years work for Trump.