Schooling his henchmen

"When I went up there," he says, recalling his installment as Watergate prosecutor, "I thought he had been victimized by his staff. I thought he had a staff that had done things on their own. That they had not let their chief know that they were participating in these cheap doings. I thought they had been doing this on their own primarily, and that Nixon was not aware of it. I thought he should have been aware of it, but that's a far different question from active participation in it, you know.

"What happened is, when I heard this tape recording where he was schooling [ chief of staff H. R.] Haldeman on how to lie, when I got to that part of it -- boy! I'll tell you! -- was it a new ball game as far as I was concerned! I just shuddered at the thought of what this was going to lead to."

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to "minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — "in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.