Cohen to spill the beans

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer is planning to tell a House committee that Trump knew ahead of time that WikiLeaks had emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and that Trump is a “racist,” a “conman” and a “cheat.”

Michael Cohen suggests that Trump also implicitly told him to lie about a Moscow real estate project. Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the project, which he says Trump knew about as Cohen was negotiating with Russia during the 2016 election campaign.

The hearing is expected to provide the most damning depiction to date of Trump’s campaign and business operations from a onetime member of the president’s inner circle. It is the latest step in Cohen’s evolution from legal fixer for the president — he once boasted that he’d “take a bullet” for Trump — to a foe who has implicated him in federal campaign finance violations.