Michael Cohen faced another day of cross-examination from lawyers representing former President Donald Trump, and his credibility came under fire again. Two CNN contributors, Bryan Lanza and Alyssa Farah Griffin, accused Trump’s former lawyer of lying under oath about not seeking a position in Trump’s White House.
Cohen testified that he did not seek a job in the Trump administration, but both Lanza and Griffin disputed this. Griffin, who worked for various Republican lawmakers and was involved with those entering the Trump administration, stated:
“I was working for a number of Republican lawmakers at that time, several of whom would go into the administration, including Mick Mulvaney as OMB director, and it was widely known and believed. Now, Michael Cohen never told me firsthand, ‘I’m going into the White House, I want to.’ But it was widely discussed that he was angling for Attorney General or to be White House counsel. There are dozens of people in Washington who could corroborate that. My jaw hit the floor when I heard him denying that.”
Lanza, a former deputy communications director for the Trump-Pence campaign, echoed this sentiment on CNN, stating:
“At least to me, Michael Cohen was pretty adamant that he wanted to be White House counsel. He said everything he was doing was to be White House counsel, he’s always injected himself with the space that I was in, which was the TV space, because Trump cared a lot about it. I always viewed that he’s always positioning, and he was pretty clear that he wanted to be White House counsel.”
This prompted CNN anchor Kasie Hunt to question whether Cohen was committing perjury. Legal analyst Elie Honig clarified that while the testimony was contradictory, it wasn’t clear-cut enough to constitute perjury, describing it as too “wishy-washy” to meet the legal standard.
