The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said Thursday he interpreted an old email to Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen from an attorney with ties to Trump’s legal team as an attempt to dangle a presidential pardon.
CNN obtained two emails from April 2018 between Cohen and Robert Costello, an attorney who said he had spoken with the President’s lawyer in the Russia investigation, Rudy Giuliani. Although Costello’s email did not specifically mention a pardon, he wrote to Cohen, “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”
“I take it as the President or people on his behalf may have been dangling the possibility of a pardon in front of Mr. Cohen to say to him, don’t tell the truth, don’t implicate the President. Play the game right and you have friends in high places, and you’ll be OK, we’ll give you a pardon,” New York Rep. Jerry Nadler told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day” on Thursday.
Nadler said that, if true, backchannel involvement from Trump in Cohen’s case would be a “terrible” obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
“That’s why we sent out 81 requests for testimony, for documents and why our committee has to investigate and get to the bottom of this,” Nadler said. “It’s also why it is essential that when the Mueller report comes out, the entire report and the evidence behind it be released certainly to Congress and as much as possible to the public.”
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN Thursday that “we have seen the President dangle pardons publicly … it doesn’t require any great imagination to picture the President also having the conversations privately as he is having them quite publicly.”
“We obviously are deeply interested in all of the documents that Mr. Cohen has produced and others that we have been able to obtain,” Schiff continued. “We’ll be looking to corroborate the evidence that we have received and this is very much a deep interest of ours.”
Cohen testified to Congress that he spoke directly about a pardon with former Trump attorney Jay Sekulow, CNN has previously reported, which Sekulow denies. But Cohen said he did not speak directly about pardons with Giuliani, who told CNN he “never offered anyone a pardon.” Cohen has told Congress his former lawyer had spoken separately with Giuilani and Sekulow about the prospect of a pardon.
Costello told CNN that Cohen’s interpretation of events is “utter nonsense” and that Cohen asked him to raise the issue of a pardon with Giuliani.
Discussions between Cohen and Costello began after Cohen, who was still part of Trump’s joint defense agreement at the time, was raided by the FBI in April 2018.
In August, Cohen pleaded guilty in a Manhattan US attorney’s case to eight criminal counts, implicating the President in a hush money scheme. He pleaded guilty in a separate case from the special counsel’s office to one count of lying to Congress about discussions related to a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow. He was sentenced in December to three years in prison.
Earlier this month, Nadler announced a sweeping investigation into Trump’s campaign, businesses, transition and administration, a probe that would lay the groundwork for Democrats if they choose to pursue impeachment proceedings against the President.
CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Manu Raju and Gloria Borger contributed to this report.