Ex Trump lawyer Cohen says paid man to rig polls

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U.S. President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted Thursday that he paid a man in 2015 to rig online opinion polls to favor Trump as he began running for the presidency.

Cohen confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that in early 2015 he paid the head of a data firm RedFinch Solutions, John Gauger, to write computer script that would place multiple votes for Trump in an online poll of news broadcaster CNBC. They repeated the effort in an online poll of website Drudge Report, which is popular with conservatives.

Trump ranked fifth in the Drudge Report poll, with about 24,000 votes, or five percent of the total, according to the Journal.

U.S. President Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen arrives at U.S. Federal Court in New York, December 12, 2018. /VCG Photo

Cohen, who also paid Gauger to create a social media account to promote himself, confirmed the main elements of the Journal story.

"What I did was at the direction of and for the sole benefit of @realDonaldTrump @POTUS (the President of the United States). I truly regret my blind loyalty to a man who doesn't deserve it," he wrote on Twitter.

Twitter screenshot

Cohen, who was the real estate billionaire's right-hand-man and fixer at the Trump Organization in New York at the time, pleaded guilty last year to charges that he violated campaign finance laws by arranging hush payments ahead of the 2016 election to women who claimed credibly to have had extramarital affairs with Trump.

Cohen implicated Trump in that crime, saying he directed the payments.

The New York lawyer, 52, was sentenced to three years in jail for the campaign finance violation and other charges. But his incarceration has been delayed while he provides support to ongoing investigations into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia and Trump's finances, which Trump has denied.

He is scheduled to testify to the newly Democratic-controlled House Oversight Committee on February 7 on his work for Trump.

The Journal report said Gauger, who is chief information officer at the Liberty University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia, was paid over 12,000 U.S. dollars in cash for the job, allegedly less than the 50,000 U.S. dollars he was promised. Cohen disputed that, insisting that Gauger was paid by check.

(Cover: U.S. President Donald Trump listens as his then personal attorney Michael Cohen delivers remarks on his behalf during a campaign stop at the New Spirit Revival Center Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, September 21, 2016. /VCG Photo)

Source(s): AFP