The planned testimony of Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney and fixer for President Donald Trump, at the House Intelligence Committee was rescheduled Wednesday to Feb. 28 — just days before he is slated to begin a federal prison sentence.
Cohen was originally scheduled to testify before that committe this Friday in a closed-door session.
But Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in a terse, one-sentence statement, said Cohen’s appearance would be delayed until Feb. 28 “in the interests of the investigation.”
Schiff did not elaborate.
Cohen is still considering testifying in public at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee before he begins serving a three-year criminal sentence in prison on March 6.
He had originally been scheduled to testify at that committee on Thursday. But last month he postponed that appearance because of what his legal advisor Lanny Davis called “ongoing threats” by Trump and Trump’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, against Cohen’s family.
Trump had urged his Twitter followers to “watch” Cohen’s father-in-law, who was placed on probation in the mid-1990s after pleading guilty in a case in which he was charged with conspiring to defraud the IRS.
Giuliani, without offering any proof, had said Cohen’s father-in-law may have ties to organized crime and was involved in criminal activity with Cohen.
Cohen, 52, pleaded guilty last year to multiple federal crimes, several of them directly related to Trump, and has cooperated by prosecutors investigating the president, including special counsel Robert Mueller.
The crimes included campaign finance violations related to Cohen facilitating hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal shortly before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs with Trump. The president denies having sex with either woman.
Cohen also admitted to making false statements to Congress by lying about when an aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow actually ended, and about the extent of Trump’s involvement in that project.
Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti in a tweet Wednesday said Cohen’s testimony at the Intelligence Committee should be in public.
