President Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen said during an interview with ABC News that he hopes to be remembered for "helping to bring this country back together."
"I think the pressure of the job is much more than what he thought it was going to be. It's not like the Trump organization where he would bark out orders and people would blindly follow what he wanted done. There's a system here. He doesn't understand the system," Cohen said in the interview, which aired Friday on "Good Morning America."
"And it's sad because the country has never been more divisive. And one of the hopes that I have out of the punishment that I've received, as well as the cooperation that I have given, [is] I will be remembered in history as helping to bring this country back together," Cohen continued.
Cohen was sentenced this week to three years in prison for financial crimes and lying to Congress. Cohen's crimes include "tax violations, lying to a bank and, during the 2016 campaign, buying the silence of women who claimed that they once had affairs with the future president," The Washington Post reported.
Cohen claims then-candidateTrump directed him to arrange payments that violated campaign finance laws. During an interview with Fox News on Thursday, the president said he "never directed" Cohen "to do anything wrong." He also claimed his former attorney "made a deal [with prosecutors] to embarrass me."
During his interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Cohen repeated what he said in his guilty plea in August, that Trump told him to pay the women because he "was very concerned about how this would affect the election."
"I'm done with the lying. I'm done being loyal to President Trump. My first loyalty belongs to my wife, my daughter, my son and this country," Cohen told Stephanopoulos.