Trump Praises Manafort, Saying ‘Unlike Michael Cohen’ He ‘Refused to Break’

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday praised his just-convicted former campaign chairman for refusing to “break” and cooperate with federal prosecutors investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, expressing appreciation for the personal loyalty of a felon found guilty of defrauding the United States government.

In a series of tweets the morning after an extraordinary day in which Paul Manafort, his former campaign chief, was convicted of tax and bank fraud and his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations he said were directed by Mr. Trump, the president appeared to suggest he was more concerned with the fallout for himself than with the crimes.

He compared Mr. Cohen unfavorably with Mr. Manafort, attacking Mr. Cohen as a bad lawyer who had caved to pressure from biased federal prosecutors while lauding Mr. Manafort as a “brave man” with a “wonderful family” who had stood strong.

“‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ — make up stories in order to get a ‘deal,’” Mr. Trump wrote, his quotation marks suggesting his disdain for the Justice Department.

The president played down the wrongdoing by both men, noting that the jury in Mr. Manafort’s case convicted him of eight counts of fraud but did not reach a conclusion on 10 other charges.

“Witch Hunt!” Mr. Trump proclaimed.

He was harsher on Mr. Cohen, writing that if anybody wanted a good lawyer, he “would strongly suggest” not hiring him. But the president also claimed falsely that the felonies to which Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty were, in fact, “not a crime.”

At the White House, the mood was somber as aides struggled to come to grips with news that raised profound questions about Mr. Trump and the future of his presidency, including whether he had lied to the American public, whether he would be impeached and whether he considered himself above the law.

Pressed on those issues by reporters at a news briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, insisted there was no crisis afoot in the West Wing. She said neither Mr. Manafort’s conviction nor Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea had anything to do with Mr. Trump, and they did not have any bearing on him.

“The president has done nothing wrong,” Ms. Sanders said during the unusually subdued question-and-answer session. “There are no charges against him. There is no collusion.”

Grim-faced as she fielded a variety of questions about Mr. Manafort and Mr. Cohen and the implications of their misdeeds for the president, Ms. Sanders recited the three-part denial again and again, as if to will the issue away.

“Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal doesn’t mean that implicates the president on anything,” she said.

Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to two campaign finance crimes, one over a $130,000 payment he made to a pornographic film actress, Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. The other was tied to an arrangement with a tabloid that bought the rights to a story about a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, and then killed it, paying her $150,000.

In the plea agreement, Mr. Trump is not mentioned by name but is referred to as “Individual-1” and, at one point, as “Individual-1, who at that point had become the president of the United States.” Prosecutors said the payment to Ms. Clifford was a campaign donation because it secured her silence to help Mr. Trump’s odds of winning the election. Campaign finance laws prohibited donations of more than $2,700 in the 2016 general election.

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Mr. Trump — who could be heard in an audio recording released last month discussing with Mr. Cohen arrangements for the payment to be made to Ms. McDougal — said he had become aware of the payments only after they were made. He emphasized that the payments Mr. Cohen admitted to in his guilty plea did not come from campaign funds.

“My first question when I heard about it was, ‘Did they come out of the campaign?’” Mr. Trump said. “Because that could be a little dicey.”

In fact, payments from either Mr. Trump’s personal or corporate accounts could prompt campaign finance reporting requirements.

Ms. Sanders said the president had not lied about the payments when he initially said he did not know about them. She called it “a ridiculous allegation” and refused to say whether the White House stood by its denial of the affairs, saying, “We’ve addressed this a number of times.”

The president also repeated his assertion that Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to crimes that were merely violations and compared that with the way former President Barack Obama was treated because of a campaign finance violation during the 2008 presidential race. He only had to pay a fine.

“He had a massive campaign violation, but he had a different attorney general, and they viewed it a lot differently,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Obama, adding a jab at his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

Mr. Trump was referring to a Federal Election Commission finding in 2013 that during Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign he did not file finance reports in a timely manner. Mr. Obama’s violation was a civil one, unlike the felonies Mr. Cohen admitted to on Tuesday — making a campaign donation above the legal limit and doing so, in Mr. Cohen’s words, “to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information.”

“Inadvertent violations like Obama’s are punished civilly” by the Federal Election Commission, Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told Vox. But criminal violations are handled like Mr. Cohen’s, in court.

Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts on Wednesday seemed to raise the possibility of a presidential pardon for Mr. Manafort, and appeared intended to be a reminder of how highly he values loyalty.

And in them, the president resorted to language more familiar to a police procedural than to the Oval Office, describing Mr. Manafort’s refusal to “break” under pressure to cut a deal with prosecutors.

In recent days, he has also referred to John Dean, the White House counsel who worked with Watergate investigators to reveal Richard M. Nixon’s role in the crimes and cover-up, as a “RAT.” And he has alluded to the possibility that Mr. Cohen might “flip,” or switch his loyalties away from the president and cooperate with prosecutors.

Some legal experts said the president’s words and his view on the predicaments of members of his inner circle were striking for their similarity to the culture of organized crime.

“By crediting Paul Manafort for not ‘breaking’ and chastising Michael Cohen for showing an interest in cooperating, he’s really adopting the language and the sentiment of prizing what the mob would call a ‘stand-up guy’ — someone who takes your rap and goes to jail because of your loyalty to the mob, rather than to your own family,” said Daniel S. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on organized crime cases in the Southern District of New York. “The parallel is to a mob boss who expects the loyalty oath from his soldiers.”

“What we’re starting to see in Trump’s message here is that it’s very important to enforce the laws only as they do not apply to him, and any laws that may apply to him, he has no interest in enforcing,” Mr. Goldman added.

Democrats seized on Tuesday’s guilty plea and verdict, saying they raised the stakes of November’s midterm elections and throwing potential roadblocks in front of the confirmation of Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. The president’s fate rests with Congress, and if Democrats win back the majority in the House, impeachment proceedings against the president could begin next year.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, called for a delay in the confirmation hearings for Judge Kavanaugh, and some rank-and-file Democrats said they would not meet with him.

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who would lead impeachment proceedings, implored Republicans to reach across party lines to address what he called the “culture of corruption” around Mr. Trump.

“The president of the United States is now directly implicated in a criminal conspiracy, numerous members of both his campaign and administration have been convicted, pleaded guilty to felonies, or are ensnared in corruption investigations, and the Judiciary Committee has real work to do,” Mr. Nadler said.

“Democrats are poised to take action to respond to this culture of corruption that has taken hold under Mr. Trump and Republican congressional majorities,” he continued. “It is not too late for my Republican colleagues to put our country ahead of their politics and join us in our work.”