On Tuesday Cohen testified privately before the Senate for nine hours. On Wednesday he testified in an open session of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Here are some experts from his opening statement:
- “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat. He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.”
- “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.”
- “You need to know that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited
my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower
negotiations before I gave it.” - “Mr. Trump is an enigma. He is complicated, as am I. He has both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”
- “He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign – for him – was always a marketing opportunity.”
- “In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
- “The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws.”
Here are five key takeaways.
Republican members of the committee behaved in a way that drew attention to the fact that Republicans tend to support Trump by attacking his opponents rather than mount any kind of defense of Trump himself. Here is how Peter Wehner puts it: “Republicans on the committee tried to destroy the credibility of his testimony, not because they believe that his testimony is false, but because they fear it is true.” And a prediction: “When this story is finally told — when the sordid details are revealed, the dots finally connected — the Republican Party will be the political and institutional version of Mr. Cohen, who squandered his integrity in the service of a man of borderless corruption.” And he cites Cohen as supporting evidence for this prediciton: “The more people that follow Mr. Trump — as I did blindly — are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering…. Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump. Every day most of us knew we were coming and we were going to lie for him about something. That became the norm.”
Frum also noticed that none of the Republicans tried to defend Trump: “None of them would dare say that Trump is truthful in speech or honest in business. None would say it is impossible he said the things about black Americans that Cohen alleges he said. Even the allegations Cohen could not corroborate are all so hideously plausible that the most pro-Trump Republicans on the Oversight Committee shied from gainsaying them. Cohen’s testimony may not all prove correct. But all of it is plausible—and not a word of it has been contradicted, let alone refuted.”
Democratic House Leadership is signaling that they prefer to open multiple lines of investigations of Trump through 2020 rather than open an impeachment inquiry.
Happening at the same time as the time as the Cohen hearing was Trump second summit with North Korea: “President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday when negotiations collapsed after the two sides failed to agree on even the first steps on nuclear disarmament, a peace declaration or reducing sanctions on the North.”
The New York Times reports that Trump ordered Kelly to issue Kushner a top secret security clearance even though intelligence officials said he should not receive one. Kelly wrote a contemporaneous memo after the order to record the fact that Trump ordered him to do it.
Elijah Cummings has given the White House until Monday to deliver all relevant security clearance documents to his committee.
Immigration News
The House voted to overturn Trump’s national emergency declaration. Only 13 Republicans voted for the bill. It will now go to the Senate.
Documents reveal that there have been thousands of reports of sexual abuse of minors in immigration custody going back to 2015, “increase in complaints while the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border was in place.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42%