- President Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen on Thursday said he had unearthed a decade’s worth of new information on old computers and telephones.
- This includes a hard drive with 14 million files, he said.
- Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis said the information “has significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees” investigating President Donald Trump.
- Cohen’s legal team is hoping the new information will allow Cohen to delay his three-year prison sentence for lying to Congress and campaign-finance violations.
- In new documents submitted to lawmakers Thursday, Cohen said Trump instructed him to lie about a Trump Tower project in Moscow.
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Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, says he has uncovered millions of files of new evidence that would be of interest to lawmakers investigating the president.
In a statement Thursday night, Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis said his client’s “recent public and closed-door testimony to congressional committees has triggered additional areas for investigation by law enforcement authorities and the Congress.”
“In fact,” Davis continued, “Mr. Cohen has recently obtained a hard drive with 14 million files from his computers and phones over the past 10 years, which we believe has significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees.”
Davis said in a letter to congressional Democrats, obtained by CNN, that his client should be given more time before his three-year prison sentence is due to begin May 6.
"Mr. Cohen needs time, resources, and assistance to separate out privileged and personal documents from these 14 million files to make the rest available for review by various congressional committees," Cohen's lawyers wrote, according to CNN.
And in documents submitted to lawmakers by Cohen's attorneys on Thursday, Cohen said that Trump told him to lie to Congress about when negotiations about a Trump Tower project in Moscow had ended.
Cohen said in public congressional testimony in February that Trump's lawyers "reviewed and edited" his testimony to Congress in 2017 and that Trump "wanted me to lie" about the Trump Tower project. He did not previously claim, however, that Trump explicitly directed his false testimony to lawmakers.
Trump's attorneys and senior Republicans have accused Cohen of being a serial liar, most recently accusing him of perjuring himself when he told lawmakers in February he had sought no job in Trump's White House.
A federal judge in December sentenced Cohen to three years in prison for lying to Congress about the Trump real-estate project in Moscow, which ultimately fell through, and for an array of financial crimes. Those included violating campaign-finance laws by facilitating payouts during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence women who said they had affairs with Trump. The president has denied having any affairs.
His sentence was originally set to begin in March, but that date was delayed so he could testify against Trump to Congress. He described the president as a "racist" and "conman" who had approved the hush-money payments.