Trump's Lawyer Shares Pictures With Black Friends To Disprove Racism Claims

Following a divisive press conference Tuesday in which President Donald Trump claimed “both sides” were responsible for the violence that led to the death of a protester during a counter-protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, the president’s personal attorney shared a photo montage Wednesday in an apparent attempt to dispel allegations that Trump sympathized with racists.

Michael Cohen posted pictures of himself with black friends and captioned the tweet: “As the son of a holocaust survivor, I have no tolerance for #racism. Just because I support @POTUS @realDonaldTrump doesn’t make me a racist.”

New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi engaged in a text conversation with Cohen about the photo montage and posted them to Twitter Wednesday.

“Did you seriously just make a collage of pictures of you with black people to prove you’re not racist?” she wrote in the correspondence.

After writing that neither Trump nor himself were racist and calling the allegations “disgusting, disgraceful and hurtful,” Cohen added: “I know President Trump and his heart. He is a good man and doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. All morning I am receiving horrific comments about being anti-black, racist, etc.. for supporting Trump. Wrong!”

“Do you think maybe it’s because of what he said yesterday and how it was praised by David Duke?” Nuzzi replied, pointing to a series of tweets by Duke that commended Trump’s press conference.

“He didn’t condemn those protesting, he expressed support for their objectives,” Nuzzi pointed out. “And then he again blamed the violence--in which a neo nazi murdered a woman--on both sides. He also wouldn’t disavow the alt-right. That’s perhaps why Duke was so happy.”

“No he did not and your [ sic ] mischaracterization of him is why he calls you and others fake news,” Cohen replied. He stopped replying to her texts after she asked him which fact was inaccurate.

In a separate statement to Business Insider, Cohen added: “I grew up in a home that denounced racism for obvious reasons. I absolutely denounce white nationalism and all those who believe in it. The comments by Trump haters are truly hurtful.”

“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump told reporters Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”

Trump would then equate the taking down of Confederate monuments with the possible removal of statues of the Founding Fathers.

“Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” he added while criticizing the “alt-left.” “So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”