Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer for President Trump, reportedly solicited – and paid for – a small tech firm to manipulate poll data to favor Trump in the lead-up to his presidential run.
Cohen paid John Gauger, owner of RedFinch LLC and the CIO at Liberty University with whom the lawyer had an ongoing relationship, to take measures to pump up Trump’s position in polls conducted by CNBC and the Drudge Report, promising a $50,000 payout, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which also claimed that $13,000 of the money was given to Gauger in a blue Walmart bag in Cohen’s Trump Organization office in Trump Tower.
Cohen denied the cash transaction, saying that “all monies paid to Mr. Gauger were by check,” the Journal reported.
“As for the @WSJ article on poll rigging, what I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @realDonaldTrump @POTUS. I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t deserve it,” Cohen tweeted Thursday.
Trump counsel, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, denied the allegations, the Journal said. “Why anyone would believe Michael Cohen at this point is an amazement to me,” Giuliani said.“This is not true. The president did not know about this if it happened.”
Cohen will begin serving a three-year sentence in March for campaign finance violations and tax fraud as well as for one count of lying to Congress – brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office – about a proposed Trump Tower in Moscow.
