Top House Republicans sent a criminal referral Wednesday prodding the Justice Department to investigate Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, over allegations he lied to Congress in several pieces of testimony.
The referral comes just as Cohen prepares to take the stand and testify against his onetime boss in a trial in New York over hush money payments made to women who claimed to have had affairs with Mr. Trump.
Reps. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and James Comer, chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, said Cohen has a record of lying under oath when testifying to Congress, which they said poisons any testimony he will give at the trial.
They suggested that it should give pause to Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case years after the payments were made.
“In short, to prosecute President Trump, Bragg has revived this ’zombie’ case relying on a known — and convicted — liar and his testimony at a congressional hearing in which he lied at least six times,” the lawmakers said in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
They point to 2019 testimony to Congress where Cohen denied committing acts that he had pleaded guilty to in court. He also falsely claimed he didn’t seek employment in the Trump White House and that he didn’t have foreign government contracts. All were false, the lawmakers said.
Cohen was a key aide to Mr. Trump for years, serving as a “fixer.” He says he was a key go-between in the hush money negotiations.
In 2018 he pleaded guilty to federal charges of fraud and campaign finance violations. He served prison time and is still on supervised release.
Cohen is considered one of the star witnesses in the prosecution of Mr. Trump, but also the one most fraught with peril because of accusations of trouble with the truth.
Earlier this year a federal judge concluded that Cohen, in addition to giving misleading public statements, committed perjury to a court.
That stems from his guilty plea for tax evasion, but his claims last year when he was testifying in preliminary matters in the Trump trial that he wasn’t actually guilty.
Asked if that meant he lied to the federal judge, he said “Yes” and “That’s true.”
“It gives rise to two possibilities: one, Cohen committed perjury when he pleaded guilty before Judge Pauley or, two, Cohen committed perjury in his October 2023 testimony,” Judge Jesse Furman said in a March ruling rejecting Cohen’s request for an early end to his supervised release.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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