Michael Cohen accuses 'racist, conman' Trump of criminal conspiracy.
Five key takeaways from the hearing.
The president faces peril having nothing to do with Russia.
Mr. Cohen’s testimony did not provide conclusive proof that incriminates the president on possible collusion with Russia. On another matter, though — one that is the province of federal prosecutors in New York and not that of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — Mr. Cohen’s testimony and documents could prove far more damaging.
Mr. Cohen said the president had firsthand knowledge of the payment made to Ms. Daniels, just before Election Day in 2016, that were part of an effort to silence her from talking about a sexual encounter she said she had with Mr. Trump. Acting at the president’s direction, he said he procured a home-equity loan to pay Ms. Daniels $130,000. But Mr. Cohen also gave the committee documentary evidence: a copy of a check dated Aug. 1, 2017, for $35,000 from Mr. Trump’s personal bank account that bore Mr. Trump’s signature. Mr. Cohen said the check was one of 11 installments that the president made to reimburse him.
Perhaps more important, Mr. Cohen said that the president directed him to lie about Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the payment to Ms. Daniels.
Cohen savaged Trump’s character.
Not content to talk only about a possible conspiracy and payoffs to Ms. Daniels, Mr. Cohen also offered a damnable assessment of Mr. Trump’s character. He said that he made bigoted remarks about African-Americans in the United States and about predominantly black nations.
'Mr. Trump is a racist. The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and big got bigots. You have heard him call foreign countries s***holes. He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black wasn't that wasn't a s***hole. This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States,' Cohen said.
'While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. And he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid. And yet I continued to work for him.'
He said Mr. Trump boasted about inflating assets when it served him, and about understating values when it helped to lower his taxes. He also carried out orders from Mr. Trump to tell contractors that Mr. Trump was refusing to pay them the money owed “for their services.”
About avoiding Vietnam through a medical deferment, Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump told him, “You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”
Mr. Cohen did offer one important piece of exculpatory information for the president. He said that despite many rumors, he knew of no tape from an elevator that showed Mr. Trump hitting his wife, Melania.
Cohen provides plenty of smoke — if not a gun
Cohen gave key claims and documents that will birth all kinds of new targets for reporters and, potentially, investigators. But most of his most important contentions require explanation and inquiry.
His statement that he heard a phone conversation in which President Trump spoke to Roger Stone about a looming WikiLeaks documents dump before it landed? We still need to know exactly where Stone allegedly got that information and whether it actually came from WikiLeaks.
The scene he painted of Donald Trump Jr. whispering to his father, “The meeting is all set,” around the time of the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer? Trump’s knowing about the meeting would be significant, but that’s hardly conclusive on the basis of what Cohen says.
Cohen’s statement that Trump’s lawyers altered his testimony about the timeline of the Trump Tower Moscow deal? It’s important to know in what way — and whether they were acting at Trump’s direction.
Cohen suggesting Trump inflated his assets while applying for a loan from Deutsche Bank to buy the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills? There are many ins and outs there.
The big takeaway here, as it has been in much of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, is that there is a lot that we don’t know, and it might have been investigated far more than we’re aware.
There is a ‘smoking gun document’
Cohen went into granular detail about a scheme that he said was cooked up by Trump, Donald Jr and the chief finance officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, to pay off Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who has alleged she had an affair with the real estate tycoon. The scheme arranged for Cohen to be paid back the $130,000 he had paid from his own money to buy Daniels’ silence just before the 2016 election, in installments, Cohen said, in order to disguise the purpose of the transactions.
Cohen produced for the committee a copy of one of the installments – a $35,000 check signed by Trump from his personal bank account on 1 August 2017, when he was already in the White House. Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, said this was the “smoking gun document” that proved a conspiracy by Trump to commit criminal fraud by hiding the purpose of company spending.
In Cohen’s account, Trump was aware of the scheme at every stage. “Oh, he knew about everything, yes,” he said. The aim was “to keep Trump as far away as possible” from the Daniels payments.
In an exchange with Katie Hill, a Democrat from California, Cohen said he had received a call from Trump when the lawyer was in the course of an interview with Vanity Fair. His boss wanted to agree on the “public messaging” about the payments.
Cohen was instructed to say that Trump “was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he was not knowledgeable of my actions”. That statement could place the president in severe legal jeopardy under campaign finance laws that prohibit the use of secret funds for political gain during an election.
Another investigation involving Trump
Speaking of which, in one exchange with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), Cohen hinted at another investigation involving Trump. And he said it involved Trump allegedly breaking the law.
“Is there any other wrongdoing or illegal act that you are aware of regarding Donald Trump that we haven’t yet discussed today?” Krishnamoorthi asked.
Cohen responded: “Yes, and again, those are part of the investigation that’s currently being looked at by the Southern District of New York.”
This would seem to be separate from the campaign finance violations to which Cohen has pleaded guilty (and in which he implicated Trump) and which had already been chewed over in the hearing. It also would not seem to be the SDNY’s probing of the Trump inaugural committee, which had also been broached. And it would be separate from anything having to do with the Mueller investigation, which is not being handled by the SDNY.
The most tantalizing prospect is that it might have something to do with the Trump Organization, but we have no idea.
The ‘catch and kill’ racket run by the National Enquirer owner goes much deeper than thought
In December, the publisher of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc (AMI), admitted to paying a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, $150,000 in hush money. In a so-called “catch and kill” deal, she agreed to keep silent about her alleged sexual affair with Trump while AMI agreed to suppress the story so that it remained secret.
Cohen’s testimony suggested that the practice of “catch and kill” at AMI both long preceded his arrival as Trump’s lawyer in 2007 – they went back at least 12 years he said – and went much wider than the McDougal affair. Under questioning by Jackie Speier, Democrat from California, he revealed that the media group frequently engaged in suppressing stories as a favor to Trump, a personal friend of AMI’s CEO, David Pecker.
AMI had tried to “catch and kill” a story that was circulating that Trump had been caught on tape hitting his wife Melania in an elevator. The story, Cohen said, was not true, but the National Enquirer’s owners had nonetheless checked it out with the intention of squashing it.
The company had also pursued “catch and kill” with a story over a Trump love child. That rumor was also untrue, to Cohen’s knowledge, but AMI had even so paid $15,000 to prevent it from becoming public.
Two questionable claims
There were two exchanges in which Cohen seemed to contradict the public record, and where he might have to explain how his statements are consistent with the facts.
He was asked on multiple occasions whether he had sought to work in the White House, and he denied it. “I did not want to go the White House,” he claimed. This is at odds with reporting, including by The Washington Post and the New York Times, indicating that Cohen had sought jobs at the White House but failed to land any. The Post reported that he had been in the mix for White House counsel and had even promoted himself as a possible chief of staff.
Cohen seemed to acknowledge at another point that this had at least been run up the flagpole and that it was decided that he would be forfeiting his attorney-client privilege with Trump. “I brought a lawyer in who produced a memo as to why I should not go in because there would be no attorney-client privilege,” he said. “And in order to handle some of the matters that I talked about in my opening, that it would be best suited for me not to go in.”
Another discrepancy involves Prague. He has denied the claim, and here he did so again, this time under oath. But he went even further, saying, “I’ve never been to Prague. I’ve never been to the Czech Republic.”
Except he told Mother Jones’s David Corn in 2016, “I haven’t been to Prague in 14 years. I was in Prague for one afternoon 14 years ago.” And he told the Wall Street Journal he was in Prague in 2001, so around the same time. Did he mean he was only there briefly? Is that the same as never having been there? Expect to hear more about this.
Ocasio-Cortez shows up the veterans
One of the sad truths about these hearings is that, even for the members who are there to elicit information (rather than grandstand), most of them aren’t very good at it. And that’s especially the case when you only have five minutes to get something out of a witness.
Enter the chamber’s much-discussed youngest new member, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
The 29-year old’s questioning was low-key, but it actually unearthed new information. She followed up on others’ questions (a novel concept!) about topics including the ways in which Trump’s inflation of his wealth could be criminal. And she got Cohen to name three Trump Organization executives who would seem to be likely candidates for subpoenas on that point:
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?COHEN: Yes.OCASIO-CORTEZ: Who else knows the president did this?COHEN: Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari.
Simple but effective. She also got Cohen to name people who might know about a potential treasure trove of information about stories the National Enquirer’s parent company bought the rights to kill them to help Trump. And she laid a predicate for House Democrats to try to get Trump’s tax returns, by asking Cohen whether they would be helpful when it comes to him inflating his assets. Cohen said they would be, and that they could be found at the Trump Organization.
All of this could turn out to be useful for Democrats moving forward.
TRUMP NEVER WANTED TO WIN
Cohen's 20-page statement describes Trump as 'a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation – only to market himself and to build his wealth and power.'
Cohen claims the president often said his White House campaign 'was going to be the 'greatest infomercial in political history.'
'He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign – for him – was always a marketing opportunity,'
"I probably threatened people for Trump over five hundred times
Cohen estimated that he threatened litigation or got into arguments on his former client’s behalf more than 500 times.
n a remarkable exchange, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) asked Cohen, “How many times did Mr. Trump ask you to threaten an individual or entity on his behalf?”
“Quite a few times,” Cohen responded. That led to a wild back-and-forth:
Cohen quickly clarified that any threats referred to litigation “or an argument with a nasty reporter that is writing an article.”
Among the evidence he brought to lawmakers to back up his claims, Cohen provided a letter he wrote in 2015 to administrators at Fordham University threatening legal action if the institution released Trump’s academic records without Trump’s consent. A Fordham University spokesperson later confirmed the university had received the letter and a follow-up phone call.
In 2015, Cohen threatened a reporter who was working on a story about Trump’s divorce settlement with his first wife, Ivana. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?” Cohen wrote in a lengthy, expletive-filled email.
But Cohen has long described himself as Trump’s fix-it guy, telling the Wall Street Journal in a January 2017 interview: “Anything that he needs to be done, any issues that concern him, I handle.”
WASHINGTON POST‘Can we go home now?’: How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s explosive testimony.
“Watch live: Convicted liar Michael Cohen testifies for democrats against Trump,” the site said.
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate project that Trump and his company pursued in the midst of the 2016 campaign.
The coverage of the hearing on Wednesday ran parallel to the reception Cohen was given from Republican lawmakers, who also questioned his credibility and the reasons he came forward. And the White House had taken a similar tack.
“This is a melodrama, it’s a soap opera, it’s a tabloid, all wrapped into one,” Fox News contributor and former congressman Jason Chaffetz said Wednesday morning. “Michael Cohen didn’t serve in the government; he wasn’t part of the executive branch; everything that they’re talking about happened before Donald Trump became the president.”
“There’s no 'there’ there,” contributor Dan Bongino said later, echoing what seems to be a common refrain after these moments from the pro-Trump crowd. “None of this is great politically. The question is, is it criminally damaging? And the answer is no.”
Fox host Tucker Carlson opened his show with a lengthy dismissal of the substance of Cohen’s testimony.
“There’s no collusion, there’s no Russian blackmail, there’s no obstruction of justice; there are none of the things that our entire media class has spent the last two years huffing and speculating wildly about,” he said, in front of an image that said “No collusion.” “If Michael Cohen had the dime he would drop it, but he doesn’t. There is nothing there. It was all a lie. Can we go home now?”
Some of the main highlights of Cohen’s testimony include detailing how deeply and personally involved Trump was in the scheme to pay off an adult-film actress who alleged that she had an affair with Trump, describing how he had long sought to protect the president, and suggesting that federal prosecutors are investigating unspecified criminal allegations involving the president that have not been made public.