In a series of Twitter messages sent from the White House residence, Trump tried again to distance himself from Cohen, who federal prosecutors say was directed by his boss to make the hush payments to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels at a time in the 2016 campaign when theirs claims could have been highly damaging.

Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison. That sentence had been decreased to reflect the information he shared with federal prosecutors, including details that implicated Trump in campaign finance violations for having authorized the payments. Cohen had faced a much lengthier sentence for his crimes of tax evasion, bank fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.

Trump asserted that his former lawyer had pleaded guilty to embarrass him and to receive a reduced prison term.

“Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me,” Trump wrote. “But he plead to two campaign charges which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty even on a civil basis.”

Later, during an interview with Fox News, Trump said Cohen had cut a deal to save his family and in exchange had agreed to “embarrass” the president. “That’s all it is,” the president said. “It’s a terrible system we have.”

In an interview, Rudy Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, elaborated on the points that Trump had made in his tweets, arguing that there was no evidence that Trump knew about the payments. And he said that even if investigators were able to prove that Trump had known about them, legal scholars were divided about whether the knowledge was in itself a crime.

“It’s a crime of interpretation,” Giuliani said. “Are you going to charge the president with a crime of interpretation?”

Giuliani said that if prosecutors or members of Congress did try to make the case that Trump should be punished for the payments, the president would argue that he believed Cohen, as his lawyer, was going to follow the law.

Trump had “a right to expect that he is going to handle it honestly,” Giuliani said. “He has a right to rely on the fact that he thought the lawyer was doing it correctly.”

Giuliani singled out Congress in particular on the question of whether the payments to Daniels and McDougal constituted illegal campaign contributions, contending that many lawmakers had engaged in the very activity that federal prosecutors had suggested, without naming him, that Trump had.

Without providing specifics, Giuliani said that nearly three dozen members of Congress had made similar payments to people who have accused them of harassment and other embarrassing allegations.

“If they want to pursue an investigation for impeachment on this and if they do want to vote on an article of impeachment, somewhere between 30 to 40 of them better get a lawyer,” Giuliani said.

But some of Giuliani’s assertions are contradicted by the evidence that prosecutors presented, and reflect the inconsistent accounts the president has given of what he knew about Cohen’s efforts.

Earlier this year, Trump firmly told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had not known about the payments. But on an audio recording made by Cohen, and seized during an FBI raid in April, Trump could be heard talking to Cohen about payments to executives at American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, to acquire years of dirt about the candidate.

Prosecutors also revealed in a sentencing submission last week that Trump attended at least one meeting involving Cohen and David Pecker, the AMI chairman, during which Pecker “offered to help deal with negative stories” about Trump’s affairs with women “by identifying such stories so that they could be purchased and ‘killed.'”

The government also suggested that in addition to Trump, others associated with the Trump campaign may have been involved, and said that Cohen “coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature and timing of the payments.”

Prosecutors have not given any indication that criminal charges against the president would be forthcoming, particularly as the Justice Department has long taken the position that sitting presidents are not subject to criminal prosecution.

Norman Eisen, co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said prosecutors in the Southern District of New York appeared to be building a broader case against the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign, possibly for whatever role they may have played regarding illegal campaign donations, using Cohen’s guilty plea as a steppingstone.

“The big fish here are the Trump campaign, the Trump Organization and, as an unindicted co-conspirator, the president himself,” Eisen said.

For months, the president has demeaned Cohen, calling him weak and praising other former aides who have refused to cooperate with authorities. Trump also suggested Thursday that, despite the plea deal by Cohen, his family could face future charges — something prosecutors have not raised publicly.

“Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did-including the fact that his family was temporarily let off the hook,” Trump wrote in one of his morning tweets.

During his sentencing hearing Wednesday, Cohen said he pleaded to the court for leniency to end his legal troubles and spare his family more embarrassment. He also said he refused to sign a full cooperation agreement, as most defendants in the Southern District of New York do, because, “I do not need a cooperation agreement to be in place to do the right thing.”

A full cooperation agreement in the Southern District of New York would require Cohen to admit to every crime he has ever committed and provide details about the crimes of others.

In Twitter posts this month, Trump also suggested that Cohen’s wife and father-in-law might face legal troubles of their own.

Before he started working for Trump, Cohen worked as a personal injury lawyer and built his own taxi business, a venture that came to him through his wife’s father, Fima Shusterman. Shusterman emigrated to the United States in 1975 from Ukraine. After he married, Cohen started doing business with Russian and Ukranian immigrants from New York, Chicago and Florida in communities known for links to organized crime. He started working for the Trump Organization in 2007.

“His father-in-law’s a very rich guy, I hear,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News broadcast Thursday.

By lunchtime, Trump was also denouncing the poor treatment his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn had received from prosecutors.

“They gave General Flynn a great deal because they were embarrassed by the way he was treated — the FBI said he didn’t lie and they overrode the FBI,” Trump wrote. “They want to scare everybody into making up stories that are not true by catching them in the smallest of misstatements. Sad!”

The New York Times

Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt © 2018 The New York Times