Associated Press Reporter Shouts About Michael Cohen During Trump-Kim Meeting

Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire shouted a question about the Michael Cohen hearing during a public meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam Wednesday.

It was the second such meeting since the leaders of the two nations, which are formally still enemies, met at a historic summit in Singapore last year.

Journalists, however, seemed focused on news back in Washington, DC.

 

At a historic meeting with Kim Jong-un in Vietnam, a shouted question from @JonLemire about Michael Cohen pic.twitter.com/YzNUGFGuF7

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) February 27, 2019

“Mr. President, do you have any reaction to Michael Cohen, his testimony?” Lemire shouted at the president.

Cohen, who once worked for Trump but has since been convicted of lying to Congress and disbarred, had already released his prepared testimony before the Democrat-controlled House Oversight Committee on Tuesday evening. The hearing itself had not yet begun. However, Trump had already issued a reaction to the document on Twitter:

Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the State Supreme Court for lying & fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time. Using Crooked’s lawyer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2019

Journalists have complained that the White House has excluded them from events featuring both leaders in Hanoi.

The two are planning to discuss a wide variety of issues, including possibly a formal end to the Korean War, and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

The White House press corps, however, was apparently eager to elicit reaction from the president on Cohen, who claimed in his prepared statement and in live testimony that the president was a “racist” and a “conman.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.