Michael Cohen plans to tell a U.S. House committee on Wednesday that President Donald Trump regularly said derogatory things about black people, according to a copy of his prepared remarks obtained late Tuesday by The New York Times.
Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney and longtime fixer, will speak at length about his former employer’s alleged misdeeds as part of what’s expected to be dramatic testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. In one of the more damning sections of the remarks, Cohen directly calls Trump a “racist” and says that, even though the president has called poor countries “shitholes, … in private, he is even worse.”
“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole.’ This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States,” Cohen will tell the committee on Wednesday, according to the prepared remarks. “While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way.”
Cohen continued to say Trump demeaned potential voters, saying “black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.”
HuffPost has reached out to the White House for comment.
The opening remarks are part of what’s expected to be withering, exhaustive testimony from Cohen following several guilty pleas that will see him spend three years in prison. Cohen pleaded guilty last year as part of Robert Mueller’s special counsel inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying he lied to Congress about a real estate deal in Moscow. Cohen also pleaded guilty to arranging hush money payments to two women who claimed that had affairs with Trump in an effort to silence them before the election.
The testimony is set to take place while Trump is abroad. The president is currently in Vietnam to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to discuss the country’s nuclear program, although it’s unclear what will come of the discussions.
Read Cohen’s remarks in full here.