Washington, D.C. -Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, sent a letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone seeking full compliance with the Committee’s previous request for documents regarding the failure of President Donald Trump to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments and liabilities to his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to silence women alleging extramarital affairs during the 2016 presidential campaign. To date, the White House has provided no documents in response to this request.
In his letter, Cummings also released new documents obtained from federal officials at the Office of Government Ethics (OGE)-the office charged with overseeing the President’s financial disclosure forms-showing that lawyers representing both the White House and the Trump Organization repeatedly provided false information to ethics officials, including “evolving stories" about whether payments were made to Mr. Cohen and the purposes of those payments.
“President Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, is now going to prison in part for his role in these hush-money payments," Cummings wrote. “During his guilty plea, Mr. Cohen said that he did this ‘in coordination with, and at the direction of’ the President ‘for the principal purpose of influencing the election.’ It now appears that President Trump’s other attorneys-at the White House and in private practice-may have provided false information about these payments to federal officials. This raises significant questions about why some of the President’s closest advisers made these false claims and the extent to which they too were acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, the President."
The Committee requested that the White House immediately begin producing all of the documents that were first requested on January 8, 2019.
The Committee also sent a letter to Alan Futerfas, Counsel for the Trump Organization, requesting full compliance with the Committee’s previous request for documents and correcting the record regarding the role of Congressional oversight.
