‘My Jaw Hit the Floor’: Two Former Trump Staffers Argue Michael Cohen Is Lying Under Oath About Wanting a Job in the White House

Michael Cohen sat for a second day of cross-examination from lawyers representing former President Donald Trump Thursday, and two CNN contributors claimed that Trump’s former fixer was lying under oath — again.

Cohen, whose questionable credibility is well-documented and being used as the primary arrow in the quiver of the defense, testified on the stand, under oath, that he was not seeking a position in Trump’s White House. However, both Bryan Lanza, former deputy communications director for the Trump-Pence campaign, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump administration staffer, stated to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday that that’s not what they heard.

Griffin said that while she did not hear firsthand from Cohen that he was seeking a job in the White House, she heard enough discussions saying he was:

I was working for a number of Republican lawmakers at that time, several of whom would go into the administration, including Mick Mulvaney as OMB director, and it was widely known and believed. Now, Michael Cohen never told me firsthand, “I’m going into the White House, I want to.” But it was widely discussed that he was angling for Attorney General or to be White House counsel. That’s, I mean, there’s dozens and dozens of people around Washington who could corroborate that. My jaw hit the floor when I heard him denying that.

Less than an hour before that, Lanza also stated on CNN — despite joking that he was afraid he’d be called to testify — that Cohen clearly indicated to him that he was gunning to be White House counsel:

[A]t least to me, Michael Cohen was pretty adamant that he wanted to be White House counsel. He said everything he was doing was to be White House counsel, he’s always injected himself with the space that I was in, which was the TV space, because Trump cared a lot about it. Just so, I always viewed that he’s always positioning, and he was pretty clear that he wanted to be White House counsel. That doesn’t mean I want to testify before anything on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. But, you know, you’re asking me. I’m not Michael Cohen. I’ll tell you the truth.

This led CNN anchor Kasie Hunt to ask a pertinent question: “Is Cohen perjuring himself here?”

The short answer is “no,” but legal analyst Elie Honig explained that while it was contradictory testimony, it was too “wishy-washy” to be considered perjury.

Watch the videos above via CNN.