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Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump’s former attorney, has handed over his cell phones to Manhattan prosecutors, he told “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday.
Prosecutors are zeroing in on the Trump Organization’s involvement in hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels as part of an effort to stop her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump days before the 2016 presidential election. A grand jury in New York has been convened to hear evidence related to the effort, sources familiar with the matter have told CNN.
Cohen met last month with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Trump has denied the affair.
“Most recently, they asked for my cell phones because they want to be able to extract from it the voice recordings that I had had with Keith Davidson, former attorney to Stormy Daniels before Michael Avenatti, as well as a bunch of emails, text messages and so on,” Cohen told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday.
Cohen said the cell phones are “new to the district attorney,” despite being obtained by federal investigators after his home was searched by the FBI in 2018.
He also responded to the release of a video of a deposition Trump gave in August to the New York Attorney General’s office, in which he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights more than 400 times and declined to answer questions, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
“Donald cannot keep track of the lies that he tells, and so, what better way to stop a fool from being deposed and hurting himself further than to tell him to plead the Fifth at least 400 times,” Cohen said.
Cohen’s disclosure on Wednesday is the latest in a series of signs that Manhattan prosecutors’ efforts to investigate the Daniels incident are heating up.
CNN has reported that former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker was set to meet with prosecutors this week as part of the probe. The district attorney’s office also reached out to Davidson, who represented Daniels in the hush money deal, in recent weeks.
Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges for facilitating the $130,000 payment to Daniels. Manhattan prosecutors are looking into whether Trump and his business falsified business records by improperly treating the reimbursement as a legal expense. That charge is a misdemeanor in New York unless it can be tied to another crime, such as campaign finance laws.
After Cohen made the $130,000 payment to Daniels, he was reimbursed, federal prosecutors said in court filings, by the Trump Organization. The company’s executives authorized payments to him totaling $420,000 to cover his original payment and tax liabilities, and reward him with a bonus, according to federal prosecutors. Prosecutors alleged the company falsely recorded those payments as legal expenses in their corporate books.
Cohen has said in court that hush-money payments were made at Trump’s direction, and federal prosecutors said that in executing the payments, Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump.
Prosecutors working under the previous DA, Cy Vance, had explored bringing charges related to the hush money scheme but some attorneys on the team were not convinced that a charge involving a federal election law violation would survive legal challenges, people familiar with the investigation told CNN.
Last year, a jury convicted two Trump Organization entities of a decade-long tax fraud scheme, which appears to have emboldened prosecutors.
This story has been updated with additional reaction and background information.
CNN’s Kara Scannell and Paula Reid contributed to this report.
Republicans have wrongly suggested that President Biden and his party are solely responsible for the situation, while Democrats have overstated former President Donald J. Trump’s role.
WASHINGTON — As the showdown over raising the nation’s debt ceiling drags on, lawmakers have spun up an array of deceptive statistics to blame their political opponents.
Republicans have misleadingly minimized their party’s own contributions and wrongly suggested that Democrats and President Biden are solely to blame. For their part, Democrats have overstated former President Donald J. Trump’s role in reaching the debt limit.
Here’s a fact check.
What Was Said
“If you look at the last four years, the Democrats have increased spending by 30 percent, $400 billion. We’re at 120 percent of G.D.P. We haven’t been in this place to debt since World War II.”
— Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, in a Jan. 29 appearance on CBS
This is misleading. It is true that discretionary spending — which is generally subject to congressional authorization each year, compared with mandatory spending levels set by other laws — increased by roughly 30 percent over the last four years. But that includes two years when Mr. Trump was president and Republicans controlled the Senate, so it is unreasonable to claim that Democrats were solely responsible for the spending increases incurred in those four years.
Democrats won a majority in the House in the 2018 midterm elections, but Republicans retained a majority in the Senate. Under a divided Congress and with Mr. Trump in the White House, discretionary spending totaled $1.3 trillion in the 2019 fiscal year, which ended in September 2019. That figure increased by $400 billion to an estimated $1.7 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year.
It is also worth noting that the 2019 fiscal year is the last year before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, spurring both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden as well as Congress to approve sweeping stimulus packages that added heavily to the government’s tab. In the 2020 fiscal year, under a Republican president and Senate, discretionary spending reached $1.6 trillion. The first Covid-19 stimulus bill, which Mr. McCarthy voted for and which was enacted in March 2020, included nearly $300 billion in discretionary spending through the 2022 fiscal year.
Mr. McCarthy’s claim that the national debt has exceeded gross domestic product by 20 percent for the first time in 80 years is also inaccurate. At the end of 2021, the national debt was at 121 percent of G.D.P. But that is actually a decrease from 2020, the last year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when it had reached 127 percent.
What Was Said
“I’d just point out that the last guy who was president increased the national debt that was over 225 years and increased the entirety of that debt by 25 percent in four years.”
— Mr. Biden in a speech on Tuesday
This needs context. Mr. Biden is correct that a quarter of the national debt was accumulated over the four years Mr. Trump was in office. But the former president did not unilaterally add to that amount. In fact, two major factors for that increase were mandatory spending levels set long before Mr. Trump took office and several bipartisan spending bills that were passed to address the pandemic.
When Mr. Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017, the national debt stood at $19.9 trillion. When he left office on Jan. 20, 2021, it was $27.8 trillion — an increase of $7.9 trillion or about a quarter of today’s total debt of $31.5 trillion.
It is difficult to estimate just how much individual spending packages added to the national debt, since costs can be financed through tapping into revenue streams such as tax collection or through borrowing, adding to the debt and incurring interest. But looking at how much bills added to the deficit is a good proxy.
The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which promotes deficit reduction, estimated that the deficit increased by $7.1 trillion under Mr. Trump over a 10-year period. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, another deficit hawk, estimated that the figure was $7.9 trillion including interest.
From the 2018 to 2021 fiscal years, the government collected $14.3 trillion in revenue, and spent $21.9 trillion, according to data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office. In that time, mandatory spending on programs such as Social Security and Medicare totaled $14.7 trillion alone. Discretionary spending totaled about $5.8 trillion. And interest payments on existing debt also accounted for $1.4 trillion of spending.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
The C.B.O. estimated that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts — which passed in December 2017 with no Democrats in support — roughly added another $1 trillion to the federal deficit from 2018 to 2021, even after factoring in economic growth spurred by the tax cuts.
But other drivers of the deficit include several sweeping measures that had bipartisan approval. The first coronavirus stimulus package, which received near unanimous support in Congress, added $2 trillion to the deficit over the next two fiscal years. Three additional spending measures contending with Covid-19 and its economic ramifications added another $1.4 trillion.
What Was Said
“Joe Biden, for the last two years, went on a spending spree the likes of which our country has never seen, you know, $5 trillion in spending, a lot of it under the guise of Covid that had nothing to do with Covid.”
— Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, at a Jan. 25 news conference
This is false. Spending under Mr. Biden has indeed added trillions to the deficit, but Mr. Scalise is wrong that this level of spending is unprecedented. Moreover, more than $2 trillion of that spending was enacted with Republican support.
The Peterson Foundation estimated that spending under Mr. Biden so far has added $4.1 trillion, while the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated $4.8 trillion including interest, which a spokeswoman for Mr. Scalise cited. But that figure is still smaller than the amount added to the deficit under the previous administration of about $7 trillion to $8 trillion.
The most costly measure signed by Mr. Biden was the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package approved with only Democratic support and enacted in March 2021. The administration also added another $1.1 trillion through executive or agency actions, according to a breakdown by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. On the other hand, the Inflation Reduction Act — which also passed with no Republican support — reduced the deficit by $240 billion.
Other deficit drivers, however, received some level of Republican support: a $370 billion infrastructure measure, $280 billion to expand veterans benefits, $80 billion to expand semiconductor manufacturing and two spending bills totaling over $1 trillion.
Additionally, Mr. Scalise’s complaint that the $1.9 trillion stimulus package had little to do with the pandemic is an inaccurate Republican refrain that uses a narrow interpretation of pandemic-related funding. The biggest expenditures in the package were $1,400 stimulus checks and an extension of unemployment benefits, intended to help families and businesses harmed by the economic effects of the pandemic.
What Was Said
This is false. Even without the 2017 tax cuts, the United States would have eventually hit its debt ceiling.
In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Whitehouse clarified that absent the tax cuts, “we would not be hitting the debt limit for some time” — not at all.
“If not for that tax scam and the lax enforcement of the law for superrich tax cheats over the last decade,” he added, “we would not even hit the current debt limit this year.”
Mr. Trump signed his tax cuts — under which most people received a tax cut, though the rich did receive proportionally more — into law in December 2017, while the debt stood around $20.5 trillion. In March 2019, the United States hit its debt limit of about $22 trillion. But the tax cuts were hardly the sole culprit, adding about $164 billion to the deficit in 2018.
The debt ceiling was last raised to $31.4 trillion in December 2021. In the four years after enactment, the tax cuts added just under $1 trillion to the debt, according to the C.B.O., representing a fraction of the $10 trillion of debt incurred in that time.
The absence of the 2017 tax cuts “would have delayed when every subsequent debt limit — including this one — had to be raised,” said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “But debt increased by almost $4 trillion in 2021 and 2022 alone. We’d have to raise it, regardless.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that he intends to ban state universities from spending money on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in hopes that they will “wither on the vine” without funding.
“It really serves as an ideological filter, a political filter,” the Republican said while speaking in Bradenton, Florida.
The proposal is a top priority for DeSantis’ higher education agenda this year, which also includes giving politically appointed presidents and university boards of trustees more power over hiring and firing at universities and urging schools to focus their missions on Florida’s future workforce needs. DeSantis, who is said to be weighing a potential 2024 presidential bid, has seen his standing among conservatives soar nationwide following his public stances on hot-button cultural and education issues.
In a press release about the announced legislation, the governor’s office called diversity, equity and inclusion programs “discriminatory” and vowed to prohibit universities from funding them, even if the source of the money isn’t coming from the state.
Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are intended to promote multiculturalism and encourage students of all races and backgrounds to feel comfortable in a campus setting, especially those from traditionally underrepresented communities. The state’s flagship school, the University of Florida, has a “Chief Diversity Officer,” a “Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement” and an “Office for Accessibility and Gender Equity.”
Tuesday’s announcement was foreshadowed in December when the governor’s office asked all state universities to account for all of their spending on programs and initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory.
DeSantis announced his higher education agenda in Bradenton, a 15-minute drive from New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college where DeSantis has installed a controversial new board with a mandate to remake the school into his conservative vision for higher education. DeSantis said his budget will include $15 million to restructure New College and hire faculty.
The new board met on Tuesday, leading to protests on the campus.
One of DeSantis’ new board members, Eddie Speir, wrote in an online post that he planned to propose in that meeting “terminating all contracts for faculty, staff and administration” of the school, “and immediately rehiring those faculty, staff and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”
DeSantis’ announcement follows a commitment earlier this month from the presidents of the state’s two-year community colleges to not teach critical race theory in a vacuum and to “not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analyzed and/or improved upon.”
The state’s education department characterized the move as a rejection of “‘woke’ diversity, equity and inclusion [and] critical race theory ideologies.”
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