“There are some in this country who do not care about the facts, but simply want to politicize this issue, choosing to presume guilt — rather than presuming innocence — so as to discredit our lawfully elected president in the public eye and to shame his supporters in the public square,” Mr. Cohen said in the statement. “This is un-American.”
Less than an hour after arriving, however, Mr. Cohen and his lawyer left the hearing room. Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Steve Ryan, told reporters on Capitol Hill that Mr. Cohen “looked forward to answering all of their questions” at a later date. Mr. Cohen largely ignored shouted questions, but told reporters, “I’ll be back.”
The senior members of the committee, Senators Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, issued a statement saying that they would reschedule Mr. Cohen’s appearance and that he would appear publicly.
“The committee expects witnesses in this investigation to work in good faith with the Senate,” they said.
Mr. Cohen’s opening statement expressed frustration at how a swirl of investigations and news media reports had characterized him and others close to the president. Critics rushed to presume guilt, Mr. Cohen said, had overtaken the facts, smeared supporters of the president — like him — and diverted attention from a pressing national security threat: Russia’s meddling in United States elections.
Mr. Cohen is the latest high-profile witness connected to the presidential campaign to meet with congressional investigators. He turned over a trove of documents to investigators late last month in advance of the interview, as well as an eight-page letter rebutting point by point a dossier accusing him of having deep ties to Russian officials.
Mr. Cohen reiterated many of those points, albeit in abbreviated form, in the remarks he submitted on Tuesday, saying that he had never engaged with or been paid by any Russian agents or anyone else to interfere with the election, to hack an organization or to spread false information to influence the campaign.
The dossier, a salacious 35-page document compiled by a retired British spy alleging that Mr. Trump and his campaign conspired with Russia during the election, portrays Mr. Cohen as one of the effort’s central figures. In one portion, it says that he met secretly in Prague with a Russian official during the summer of 2016.
Mr. Cohen said that in fact he had never been to Prague and, at the time of his alleged visit, was making a college visit to Los Angeles with his son.
“Let me be totally clear that I am innocent of the allegations raised against me in the public square,” Mr. Cohen said in the statement.
Mr. Cohen was likewise dismissive of suggestions that a 2015 effort by the Trump Organization to build a Trump Tower in Moscow was anything more than a business transaction. A business associate of Mr. Trump, Felix Sater, wrote in a series of emails to Mr. Cohen that the deal could be highly advantageous for Mr. Trump politically, showing the Russians his negotiating skills.
“This was solely a real estate deal and nothing more,” Mr. Cohen said. “I was doing my job.”
Mr. Cohen sought to present himself as the victim of “misinformation and unnamed or unverifiable sources.” At one point, he compared himself to a 12-year-old Missouri boy who he said had been attacked for wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
“My name is mentioned more than a dozen times in the lie-filled dossier and so, within moments of BuzzFeed’s publication, false allegations about me were plastered all over the national and international press,” he said. “The accusations are entirely and totally false.”
Mr. Cohen also urged the investigators to set aside internecine politics in favor of a unified response to Russia.
“If we are really concerned about a Russian attempt to divide our country and discredit our political system,” Mr. Cohen said, “then the best thing we can do is put aside our infighting, stop presuming guilt rather than innocence of American citizens and address this national security threat as a united people at its source.”
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