By Denis Slattery, Stephen Rex Brown and Chris Sommerfeldt

New York Daily News

NEW YORK — The former fixer has flipped — again.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s erstwhile personal attorney and “fixer,” pleaded guilty Thursday to making false statements to Congress about a scuttled Moscow Trump Tower project and his contacts with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Cohen made an early-morning surprise appearance in federal court in lower Manhattan, where he entered his plea as part of a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller in the ongoing federal investigation into Russian interference in the last presidential election.

He admitted to making false statements last year to the Senate Intelligence Committee about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and misleading lawmakers about communications he had with the Kremlin — in order to stay in line with his old boss.

Among other falsehoods, Cohen told Congress that all discussions of the Moscow Trump Tower project ended by January 2016, when they had actually continued until June of that year and that the president and Trump family members were privy to ongoing negotiations despite public denials.

“I made these statements to be consistent with Individual 1’s political messaging and to be loyal to Individual 1,” Cohen said, noting that no one instructed him to lie.

He identified Trump by name as “Individual 1.”

Trump, leaving the White House en route to Argentina for the annual G-20 summit, slammed Cohen as a “weak person.”

“What he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence,” he said of his former attorney.

The president, who repeatedly denied having any business interests in Russia during the campaign, said he simply decided to pull out of the proposed Moscow project and focus on his political ambitions, adding that “there would have been nothing wrong if I did” build a Trump-branded property in the former Soviet Republic.

Trump abruptly canceled a scheduled sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian ships and 24 crewmen last weekend.

Cohen’s lawyer, Guy Petrillo, said he would give the court a letter outlining how his client has cooperated with Mueller’s investigation. ABC News reported that Cohen has already provided dozens of hours of interviews to the special counsel’s team.

In August, Cohen struck a deal with prosecutors from the Southern District of New York and pleaded guilty to eight counts of bank fraud, tax fraud and campaign finance violations in relation to payments made to keep a pair of women quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.

The 52-year-old admitted that the payments were made “at direction of the candidate,” implicating the president in a scheme to keep information that would have been harmful to his campaign from the public.

Months earlier, the FBI raided Cohen’s Manhattan home, office and hotel room as part of a probe into his business dealings.

Federal guidelines recommend Cohen be sentenced up to six months for his false statements. The maximum he could face is five years in prison. He is expected to be sentenced on all charges on Dec. 12.

The relationship between the president and the one-time personal injury attorney, who up until June served as the Republican Party’s deputy finance chairman and was one of Trump’s most ardent cheerleaders, has publicly soured since the initial plea.

Trump has gone on the offensive against his one-time right-hand man, blasting him for “flipping” and thumbing out angry tweets and accusing him of making up stories “in order to get a ‘deal.’”

Asked why someone he now calls “weak” and “not very smart” was a vice president at the Trump Organization, co-president of Trump Entertainment and a board member of his son’s Eric Trump Foundation, the president was vague.

“Because a long time ago he did me a favor,” he responded.

Mueller directly asked Trump about the Moscow project among a list of written questions that the president responded to last week, according to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Now serving as the president’s lawyer and spokesman, Giuliani said the president’s answers about the deal don’t put him in legal jeopardy.

“There was a proposal, but it never went beyond that,” Giuliani said. “There was no equity, no money put up, no deal was made. Just because you are having a business proposal with Russia, it doesn’t mean you’re colluding with Russia.”

He then unloaded on Cohen.

“He’s a liar. That son of a b—-h should have been disbarred months ago. He’s a disgrace to the profession. He’s a really bad guy. He’s a goddamn liar,” Giuliani said in a phone interview.

Trump has spent the past year and a half attempting to discredit the Mueller investigation, labeling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” as a growing number of his former top aides and associates have been indicted or accepted plea deals on a variety of charges.

Mueller has filed charges against five people once affiliated with Trump’s campaign or administration, 13 Russian nationals, 12 Russian intelligence officers, three Russian companies, and two others since taking over the probe last May.

According to court documents unsealed earlier in the week, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman convicted of tax and bank fraud, breached a plea deal struck with the special counsel’s office by repeatedly lying to investigators.

Court papers released Thursday by the special counsel’s office added new detail about the extent of Cohen’s communications with Trump about the Moscow project — even as Trump insisted on the campaign trail in 2016 that he had “nothing to do with Russia.”

“In truth and in fact, and as Cohen well knew, Cohen’s representations about the Moscow project he made to (Congress) were false and misleading,” prosecutors wrote.

Cohen claimed to Congress that he discussed the project with Trump only three times, and that talk of the deal ended in January 2016. However, prosecutors said that Cohen discussed the deal with Trump more than that. He also briefed members of Trump’s family on the possible deal and asked Trump about traveling to Russia to work on the deal, according to court papers.

In May 2016, Cohen also discussed a trip to Russia with Felix Sater, according to papers. Prosecutors did not identify Sater by name, but previous reporting links Sater to text messages cited in the documents.

Sater wrote Cohen that a Russian official “would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia’s Davos it’s June 16-19. He wants to meet you and possibly introduce you to either (Putin) or (Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev).”

Plans for Cohen to travel to St. Petersburg were in the works, but on June 14, 2016, he told Sater in the lobby of Trump Tower that the trip was off, papers say.

Cohen also told Congress he didn’t recall any response or contact from the Russian government about the proposed real estate deal.

But in his plea he admits that he contacted Putin’s longtime adviser and press secretary Dmitry Peskov, identified in court documents as “Russian Official 1,” for help with the project.

The Kremlin has said it never responded to Cohen’s request for help. According to court documents, Cohen now admits he received a reply from Russia, and that during a telephone call with Peskov’s assistant in January 2016, he “requested assistance in moving the project forward” with land and financing.

A close friend of Cohen told the New York Daily News that the attorney said in 2016 that the proposed project involved Emin and Aras Agalarov, a Russian pop star and his billionaire father who has close ties to Putin. The pair were also instrumental in arranging the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., campaign officials and Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

“They’re one of the largest builders in Moscow and if anyone could put up a giant building it was them,” the source told the Daily News. “It fell apart simply because Russia’s economy was going into the gutter. Between the sanctions and everything else, they had no money and that’s why it fell apart.”

The special counsel has been eyeing the Moscow deal for months, according to former Trump campaign staffer Sam Nunberg, who was grilled before Mueller’s grand jury in March.

“They asked me if I knew anything about the Trump Tower Moscow deal and I didn’t know anything about it,” he told the Daily News. “I had nothing to give them on this.”

Nunberg was fired from Trump’s campaign in late 2015, but worked for Trump as a consultant on and off since 2011.

Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor in New York who was part of the team that convicted Gambino family boss John Gotti, said the details revealed Thursday don’t necessarily spell trouble for Trump.

“It doesn’t strike me as a valid basis to bring any charges against the president,” he said.

However, Cohen’s plea could be seen as a warning sign for others, including Donald Trump Jr., who have testified before Congress or spoken to Mueller’s team.

“It’s a message to other people that this is a basis under which you can be prosecuted,” Cotter added.

Fellow former federal prosecutor Jeff Cramer agreed.

“It’s fair to say that there are others in the Trump Organization who knew about this interaction,” Cramer said. “If you knew about this interaction and lied about it to Mueller or Congress you’re staring at a federal charge.”