Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Trump project in Russia

President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, admitted Thursday he lied to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal he had pursued on Trump’s behalf during the heat of the 2016 Republican campaign. He said he did so to be consistent with Trump’s “political messaging.”

Cohen’s guilty plea makes clear that prosecutors believe that Trump, who insisted repeatedly throughout the campaign that he had no business dealings in Russia, was continuing to pursue the project weeks after he had clinched the Republican nomination for president and well after he and his associates have publicly acknowledged.

The negotiations about building a Russian Trump Tower continued as late as June 2016 — the same month Trump’s oldest son met in Manhattan with a Kremlin-connected lawyer — even though Cohen told two congressional committees last year that the talks ended that January.

Cohen also discussed the proposal with Trump on multiple occasions and with unidentified members of the president’s family, according to court papers filed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. Cohen is cooperating with Mueller and has met with his team seven times, prosecutors say.

The Cohen case was filed in New York a week after Trump and his lawyers provided Mueller with responses to written questions and is the first new charge filed by the special counsel since the appointment of Matthew Whitaker, who has spoken pejoratively about the investigation, as acting attorney general with oversight of the probe. Whitaker was advised of the plea ahead of time, according to a person familiar with the investigation.