Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, declined to reaffirm his sworn congressional testimony that Trump directed him to commit crimes, deflecting when CNN anchor Jake Tapper pressed him on the claim.

Cohen served as the star witness in New York prosecutors’ 2024 hush money case against Trump, which involved the illegal use of money to buy a sex worker’s silence. The payments, made in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, became the basis for charges that made Trump the first former U.S. president to become a convicted felon after he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in an effort to keep word of his affair with Stormy Daniels from public view. Trump, who denies the affair and has called the prosecution politically motivated, was sentenced in January 2025 to an unconditional discharge — a penalty that upheld the felony convictions while imposing no prison time, fine, or probation — days before returning to the White House, and he has since appealed the verdict.

Cohen later turned on his former boss, testifying that he lied and bullied for Trump during his years at the Trump Organization. His break with Trump followed his own 2018 guilty pleas to federal charges including campaign-finance violations tied to the hush-money payments and lying to Congress, for which he served roughly three years in prison and home confinement. In February 2019, he told a House Oversight Committee hearing that Trump had directed him to commit crimes — the sworn statements now at the center of Tapper’s question. That record of admitted deception also made Cohen’s credibility a focal point of the defense at Trump’s trial. Among his statements to reporters, he warned that “there will never be another election again in America” if Trump were reelected.

After years of additional criticism of his former employer, much of it aired on his podcast “Mea Culpa,” Cohen is now set to become a radio interviewer, with a Trump interview recorded and ready to air.

But when Tapper asked Cohen to repeat the claims he made before Congress about Trump, Cohen declined.

“Let me just ask you, because you say that you haven't forgotten the past. You testified under oath, obviously, that President Trump directed you to commit crimes. Do you stand by that?” Tapper asked.

“So let me say this. I will not discuss what I had said in the past, what I had stated under oath,” Cohen said quickly. “I will not go there simply because I want to live for the future. I refuse to be pulled back into yesterday's news and yesterday's headlines, so that a slew of people can turn around and start to try to pull it apart.”

Cohen added that he believes “there is forgiveness,” and acknowledged that prior to Trump taking office, “I did have a pardon application in with President Biden.”

The former lawyer then confirmed, after Tapper asked, that he had made the same request of Trump.

“What I did is I took that same application with the same documentation, and I just rewrote the cover letter, removing the name of president Joe Biden and inserting the name President Donald Trump,” Cohen said.

Cohen added that as of Thursday he had not received a response from the White House to his application.

The exchange highlights Cohen’s unusual position: the star witness behind the only criminal conviction of a U.S. president is now awaiting a clemency decision from that same president — his 2018 convictions were federal offenses, which fall under the president’s pardon power — while preparing to interview him on air.

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