Trump’s ex-lawyer Cohen: He said black people were ‘too stupid to vote for me’

US President Donald Trump said prior to his election that “black people are too stupid” to vote for him, according to his former attorney Michael Cohen.

Cohen recalled the conversation as well as several other racist remarks made by the president before the 2016 elections in an interview with Vanity Fair published Friday.

Breaking his silence since pleading guilty on August 21 to bank fraud and campaign finance violations in an agreement with New York prosecutors, Cohen claimed that he wanted “to clear his conscience and warn voters about what he sees as the president’s true nature in advance of the midterm election.”

The 52-year-old New York lawyer and businessman recalled a discussion at Trump Tower after a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen said he had told Trump that the “rally looked vanilla on television,” referencing the lack of black people in the audience.

The ex-aide claimed that in response, Trump said “that’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

Several years prior, the two had a conversation following the death of former South Africa President Nelson Mandela in which Cohen asserted that Trump quipped, “name one country run by a black person that’s not a s—hole… name one city.”

During a January meeting with members of Congress in the Oval Office, Trump reportedly questioned why the US would accept more immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa. The White House, at the time, denied that the president had employed such language.

Cohen also recalled to Vanity Fair how in 2000 when he had been traveling through a “rougher neighborhood of Chicago with Trump, the then-reality-TV-star remarked that “only the blacks could live like this.”

The White House did not respond to the magazine’s request for comment on Cohen’s accusations.

In late September, ABC News reported that Cohen had spent hours over the past month being interviewed by investigators of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The report was likely bad news for Trump as Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation increasingly closes in on the White House.

Cohen did not make a commitment to cooperate when he pleaded guilty, but it was clear that cooperation could help him get a lighter sentence.

Mueller is probing whether the Trump election campaign in 2016 colluded with Russian efforts to damage his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and whether Trump has sought to illegally obstruct the investigation.

But the span of the investigation also reportedly encompasses Trump’s business dealings, to which Cohen had a front seat during the decade before the election as a senior executive in the president’s real estate business in New York, the Trump Organization.

Cohen pleaded guilty to charges involving his arrangement of payouts of hush money just before the November 2016 vote to two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump.

In the plea, Cohen stated that he had acted at his boss’s request to buy their silence “with the purpose of influencing the election.”

Agencies contributed to this report.