Trump denies directing Michael Cohen to break the law, says it is Cohen's fault if anything illegal happened

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Michael Cohen and Donald Trump.

President Trump has denied directing his former lawyer Michael Cohen to break the law, and said that it is Cohen's own fault if anything he did on Trump's behalf was illegal.

Trump tweeted on Thursday: "I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law."

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday for an array of crimes he committed while employed by the president.

Cohen has implicated Trump, saying he broke the law out of "blind loyalty" to the president. He said in court that he had felt it was his "duty" to cover for Trump's "dirty deeds."

"I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen that I deeply admired," he said.

His lawyer, Guy Petrillo, said during Wednesday's sentencing that Cohen had come forward "to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our country."

Cohen lied to Congress about his involvement in a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and made hush-money payments in 2016 to two women who said they had affairs with the president.

Cohen implicated Trump in the campaign-finance violations, which were connected to the payments, saying they were made on the president's behalf at the height of the 2016 campaign.

Trump said on Twitter on Thursday that Cohen "was guilty on many charges unrelated to me."

"Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me, but he plead to two campaign charges which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty even on a civil bases," Trump wrote.

He said that Cohen lied about being guilty to get a reduced sentence: "Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did-including the fact that his family was temporarily let off the hook. As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me!"

Trump, who once had a close relationship with Cohen, called his former personal lawyer a liar before he was sentenced.