The Trump thread: All things Donald

[Athos_131]

Anyone who consistantly espouts views like those -whether geniune or not- cannot be considered a human being.

Coward, Bigot, Hypocrite or Liar are better monikers.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Planned in Michael Cohen’s Testimony: A Litany of Accusations Against Trump

WASHINGTON — Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, is planning on portraying his onetime client in starkly negative terms when he testifies Wednesday before a House committee, and on describing what he says was Mr. Trump’s use of racist language, lies about his wealth and possible criminal conduct.

Mr. Cohen’s plans were laid out in broad strokes by a person familiar with what he intends to say in his testimony. And they indicate that Mr. Cohen will use documents and his personal experiences to support his statements.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denounced Mr. Cohen.

“Disgraced felon Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying to Congress and making other false statements,” she said. “Sadly, he will go before Congress this week and we can expect more of the same. It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have been preparing for days for Mr. Cohen’s testimony, which will take place over several hours while the president is in Vietnam for a summit meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. The president’s aides have been anxious about the effect that the testimony might have on him.

They anticipate, though, that Republican allies on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform will aggressively question Mr. Cohen’s credibility, trying to paint him as a liar and accusing him of fabricating stories to help his cause.

Lanny J. Davis, a lawyer and adviser to Mr. Cohen, declined to discuss details of Mr. Cohen’s testimony, saying only that Mr. Cohen “worked very hard on this moment to not only tell the truth, but to back it up with documents.” Mr. Davis said Mr. Cohen’s response to questions about his truthfulness will be “I take full responsibility, I lied in the past; now you have to decide if I’m telling the truth.”

The testimony provides Mr. Cohen with the opportunity to tell his story under penalty of perjury before an audience of millions of people, about two months before he is scheduled to report to prison.

Among the most explosive and potentially damning aspects of Mr. Cohen’s testimony will be providing evidence of potential criminal conduct since Mr. Trump became president, according to the person familiar with the plans.

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That potential conduct stems from reimbursements that were made to Mr. Cohen in 2017 for hush money payments that he made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress. In October 2016, during the height of the presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her claims of a previous affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen will describe in what was called “granular detail” the plan to pay Ms. Daniels, which he will say was initiated by Mr. Trump, the person familiar with the testimony plans said. Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty to a federal campaign finance-related charge in connection with that payment. Prosecutors have implicated Mr. Trump, identifying him as “Individual 1,” in connection with that charge in documents filed in the case.

He will also discuss how long Mr. Trump continued to ask about plans for a Trump Tower project in Moscow after the Iowa caucuses had taken place in February 2016. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty last November to lying to Congress in testimony in 2017 about the duration of time over which the Moscow project discussions took place.

Mr. Cohen was paid $35,000 a month under what was described by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as a retainer agreement, some of which was a reimbursement for the payment to Ms. Daniels. There was never a retainer agreement signed between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization, the person familiar with the payments said.

The person briefed on Mr. Cohen’s plans said he is planning to bring documents that will illustrate his claims. The person familiar with the plans indicated that Mr. Cohen will present other documents beyond the financial statements, but the person did not specify what those might be. The documents will be shared in a way for the viewing public to see them, the person said.

He is prepared to describe Mr. Trump making racist statements, as well as lying or cheating in business. Last fall, Mr. Cohen told Vanity Fair that Mr. Trump frequently used racist language, telling the magazine that his former boss said during the 2016 campaign that “black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

He will also describe the president inflating or devaluing his net worth, referring to a financial statement of Mr. Trump’s that Mr. Cohen has in his possession, the person said. Those financial statements cannot be independently verified without Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which he has never made public, the person said.

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Primarily, the person said, Mr. Cohen plans to make clear why his approach to and views of Mr. Trump have changed. In an interview last year with ABC News, Mr. Cohen said that he did not want to lie anymore, and that his priorities were his children, his family and his country.

Mr. Cohen has spent more than 70 hours with investigators for the special counsel investigating possible conspiracy by the Trump campaign with Russian officials, as well as with investigators from the Southern District of New York.

The special counsel’s office has said his information was truthful and helpful in its inquiries; prosecutors in Manhattan have validated Mr. Cohen’s claims about Mr. Trump and the hush money payments in their court filings.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Thousands of allegations of sexual misconduct toward migrant children reported

Thousands of allegations that migrant children in U.S. custody were subjected to sexual abuse, harassment or inappropriate sexual conduct were reported over a four-year span to the government agency tasked with overseeing their care, according to documents released Tuesday by a Democratic lawmaker.

The documents, provided by the office of Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida, show more than 4,550 allegations were reported to the Office of Refugee Resettlement between fiscal years 2015 and 2018. That agency, which prepared the documents, oversees the care of unaccompanied and separated migrant children and is a part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

During the same period, about 1,300 sexual abuse allegations were reported to the Department of Justice, according to the documents. Nearly 180 involved allegations of staff committing sexual abuse against migrant children at government-run shelters. The documents were first reported by Axios.

Deutch said Tuesday during a House hearing on migrant family separations that he was “deeply concerned” about the “high number” of allegations of sexual assaults on migrant children in government custody.

“These documents detail an environment of systemic sexual assaults by staff on unaccompanied children,” he said.

He added the records show there have been 154 allegations of sexual assault by staff on unaccompanied migrant children in facilities under U.S. custody in the past three years, appearing to refer to the numbers from fiscal years 2016 to 2018.

Deutch said that amounted to an average of “one sexual assault by HHS staff on an unaccompanied minor per week.” He then asked if concerns about migrant children being potentially exposed to sexual abuse factored into discussions about migrant family separations.

The comment drew an intense response from Cmdr. Jonathan White, a career staffer with Health and Human Services who led the department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their families after the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.

“Let me first correct an error, those are not HHS staff in any of those allegations. That statement is false,” White said.

The government contracts nonprofit and private companies to operate shelters where migrant children are held before they are released to a sponsor, usually a parent or close relative already in the country.

Caitlin B. Oakley, an HHS spokeswoman, said in a statement to NBC News that the safety of children in its care “is our top concern.”

“Each of our grantees running standard shelters is licensed by the respective state for child care services,” she said, adding that in addition to “rigorous standards” put in place by the government, “background checks of all facility employees are mandatory.”

“These are vulnerable children in difficult circumstances, and ORR fully understands its responsibility to ensure that each child is treated with the utmost care,” she added, referring to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. “When any allegations of abuse, sexual abuse or neglect are made, they are taken seriously and ORR acts swiftly to investigate and respond."

During a contentious back and forth, Deutch tried to interrupt White, who added, “You are speaking of allegations of sexual abuse against members of my team.”

“I saw thousands of cases of sexual abuse if not by HHS staff then by the people that HHS staff oversees, I will make that clarification. It doesn’t make what happened any less horrific,” Deutch responded.

White said the 154 cases Deutch was referring to were allegations and not confirmed reports of sexual assaults, adding, “This is a longer conversation.”

“In every conversation that we had about separation, we opposed separation,” White added.

White previously told a House subcommittee that the agency tasked with caring for unaccompanied migrant children would never "have supported" family separations at the border.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Rep. Matt Gaetz’s very witness-tamper-y Michael Cohen tweet

A Republican member of Congress on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Michael Cohen engaged in affairs with multiple “girlfriends” and suggested his wife might cheat on him while he’s in prison — all on the eve of Cohen’s public testimony.

President Trump and his allies have camped out in a whole host of gray areas when it comes to obstruction of justice and witness tampering over the last two years. But this one from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) doesn’t appear to be nearly so gray.

Here’s Gaetz’s tweet:



First off, if any member of Congress were a candidate to tweet such a thing, Gaetz would be it. He has carved out a niche for himself in the House as one of its most controversial members, and he has unabashedly aligned himself with Trump on basically all things. He has regularly attacked special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation and suggested nefariousness in the Justice Department. To the extent that Gaetz is putting himself on the line by attacking Cohen on the eve of his public testimony, he’s playing to type.

But just how much trouble could he put himself in?

The Post’s Deanna Paul has written about potential witness tampering a number of times in recent months, including when Trump tweeted his own innuendo about Cohen’s family last month. The key is that the intent needs to be to intimidate, threaten or “corruptly persuade” another person with the goal of influencing their testimony or preventing it altogether.

As she noted, whatever the body of Trump’s tweets and public statements suggest as a whole, he often injects some ambiguity — i.e. by suggesting Cohen’s father-in-law should be investigated rather than outright accusing him of anything illegal. Trump could perhaps argue he’s venting or raising legitimate issues that just so happen to be lodged at a time when Cohen was preparing to testify against him.

But Gaetz’s tweet is more difficult to explain away. Shortly after it went up, he defended himself against the witness-tampering allegations by telling Sam Stein that “it is challenging the veracity and character of a witness. We do it everyday. We typically do it during people’s testimony.”

Gaetz added: “This is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas."

But this tweet wasn’t just Gaetz making an allegation about Cohen’s character. If he had stopped halfway through, perhaps this argument would hold water. What’s the most problematic is the second part, where he alludes to the possibility that Cohen’s wife will cheat on him while he’s in prison.

That is not an allegation, and there’s really no argument that it has anything to do with Cohen’s veracity or character; it’s a suggestion about something that could happen in the future that would seem very likely to rattle any normal man on the eve of one of the biggest days of his life.

We’re about to find out what Mueller’s thresholds are for obstruction of justice and witness tampering. But whatever they are, Trump is insulated because Justice Department rules say a sitting president can’t be indicted. That means Congress is the arbiter, and even if Trump would be convicted of witness tampering in a court of law, he could survive.

But Gaetz has no such insulation, and you can make a pretty convincing argument that his witness-related tweet is far less veiled that Trump’s have ever have been.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Read: Michael Cohen's opening statement to Congress



Individual-1 is going to have a very bad day.

Which makes it a good day for me.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

The really damning stuff should be the financial information.  Yeah playing hankey spanky with Stormy Daniels, and the recurring theme of pictures of himself look good in the news, but what might actually get him impeached, (Or make him inelligible for re-election) are what Democrats have been asking for for decades:  His taxes, and all the money he's been hiding overseas.  Not to mention just how much he's embezzled from his campaign fund.

How much he defrauded his own voters.  Rob from the poor to make himself richer.

He is the swamp.

[psiberzerker]

It's really weird that the outspoken MAGAts are so suspiciously silent right now.  As if there's nothing to Report in the Whitehouse.  Isn't it?  Am I the only one that hears crickets right now?

[Jed_]

A pickup passed me the other day with two huge flags flapping in the wind:

COPS LIVES MATTER

TRUMP 2020


I’ll agree with the former.

I often try and look at the people in their vehicles when I see a Trump bumper sticker, you know, just to see what stupid looks like.  But this guy was going way too fast.

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Donald Trump Inflated His Net Worth By $4 Billion When He Tried To Buy The Buffalo Bills

Not much going on today, other than the president’s former lawyer and fixer testifying before Congress that the president is a “racist,” a “conman,” and a “cheat.” Good thing for this humble sports website that the testimony has a sports angle!

In 2014, Donald Trump attempted to purchase the Buffalo Bills. That didn’t end up happening, as Terry Pegula was eventually named the winning bidder. (It does not do to spend too much time thinking about the alternate universe in which Trump won the bidding, and how much better off we’d all be right now.) As part of his Congressional testimony today, Michael Cohen submitted three years of Trump’s financial statements, which were submitted to Deutsche Bank in 2014 as part of an application for a loan for the money required to buy the Bills. The third of those three years shows a very different bottom line.

Donald Trump’s listed total net worth for each year:

2011: $4,261,590,000
2012: $4,558,680,000
2013: $8,661,970,000

What explains the jump? Trump, alleges Cohen, kept two sets of books.

“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes,” Cohen said in his testimony, “and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”

When applying for the Deutsche Bank loan (and, of course, to convince other NFL owners that he was rich enough), it was in Trump’s interest to appear as wealthy as possible. So, in the most recent financial statement, Trump added $4 billion to his assets with the previously unused and extremely nebulous line item “Brand Value.”



The three years of documents, as submitted to Congress by Cohen, are below.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Michael Cohen Testimony: Key Updates

Here are the most important highlights so far:
Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Trump, after becoming president, told him to lie to the public about hush payments to the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels.

Mr. Cohen presented life in “Trump world” as a Faustian bargain in which he and others sacrificed their integrity for the “intoxicating” whiff of power.

Mr. Cohen acknowledged that he lied under oath to Congress about a Trump Tower project in Moscow, saying he was trying to protect Mr. Trump. “I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore,” he said.

Republicans are assailing his credibility, noting that he is going to prison in two months for lying to Congress.

Mr. Cohen said he had no evidence of collusion with Russia but did have suspicions.

Mr. Cohen offered a blistering assessment of the president: “He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat.” And Mr. Cohen provided documents including copies of checks and financial statements.

Mr. Cohen says Mr. Trump told him to lie about a hush payment.
Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump asked him to lie to the public about a scheme hatched in the run-up to the 2016 election to make $130,000 in hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Trump, as a candidate, initiated the hush payment plan and, while president, arranged for 11 checks reimbursing the lawyer “as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” a crime to which Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty.

After news reports about the payments in February 2018, Mr. Cohen told lawmakers, the president called him to discuss what the lawyer should say publicly about the scheme. Mr. Trump told him to say that the president “was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he wasn’t knowledgeable of” Mr. Cohen’s actions.

Democrats pressed Mr. Cohen on whether Mr. Trump provided false financial information to hide the money paid to Ms. Daniels. Mr. Trump’s annual personal financial disclosure statement in 2017 made no reference to reimbursing Mr. Cohen that year for the hush payment.

But the statement filed by Mr. Trump last year included a footnote indicating a repayment of $100,001 to $250,000 to Mr. Cohen, raising questions about whether the 2017 filing had improperly omitted the debt. While the 2018 statement did not specify the purpose of the payment, it is understood to refer to the hush payment.

“Why do you think the president did not provide the accurate information in his 2017 financial disclosure form?” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Cohen on Wednesday. “What was he trying to hide?

Mr. Cohen said the goal of the payment was to prevent Ms. Daniels from telling her story. “That would have embarrassed the president and it would have interfered with the election,” he said.

For Mr. Cohen, life in ‘Trump world’ was in service of one man’s ambitions.
Mr. Cohen described his 10 years working for Mr. Trump as a trip into a world of deceit in which the lawyer ignored his own conscience in order to get close to a magnetic person of power.

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“Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” Mr. Cohen said. When he met Mr. Trump, he knew him as “a real estate giant” and icon. “Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating,” he said.

In private business, Mr. Cohen said he rationalized Mr. Trump’s dishonesty as “trivial” but as president, he said, “I consider it significant and dangerous.”

Having pleaded guilty to a series of crimes, Mr. Cohen said he had  recognized that he sacrificed his own ethics and was seeking redemption for his own misdeeds.

“The more people who follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering,” he said. “I lost it all.”

Mr. Trump ‘lied about’ the Moscow project during the campaign.
Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s chairman, released a memo laying out the hearing’s scope last week. Conspicuously absent: Russia and its election interference campaign.

After consulting with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, lawmakers determined that Mr. Cohen would generally not be allowed to publicly discuss matters related to its continuing investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian election manipulation efforts.

But Mr. Cohen did testify that Mr. Trump  personally monitored negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, asking about it “at least a half-dozen times” between January and June 2016 while running for president. “Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,” Mr. Cohen said in his opening statement.

And while Mr. Trump did not explicitly instruct him to lie, through his actions he “made clear to me” that “he wanted me to lie” and the president’s lawyers reviewed Mr. Cohen’s false testimony to Congress about the Moscow project, Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Cohen says he has no evidence of collusion with Russia but does have suspicions.
Mr. Cohen said he had no “direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.” But, he added, “I have my suspicions.”

He pointed to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s eldest son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman; met with visiting Russians after being told that they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

The president has denied knowing about the meeting at the time, but Mr. Cohen cast doubt on that, saying he was in Mr. Trump’s office in June 2016 once when Donald Jr. came in, went behind his father’s desk and, speaking in a low voice, said, “The meeting is all set.” The candidate, he said, replied, “O.K., good. Let me know.”

Mr. Cohen said that might have referred to the Russia meeting because “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world” and that his son “would never set up any meeting of significance alone and certainly not without checking with his father.”

Mr. Cohen: ‘He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.’
Mr. Cohen painted a vivid and damning portrait of Mr. Trump, comparing him to a mobster who inflated his net worth, rigged an art auction, paid off women, frequently used racist language, expected aides to lie on his behalf and committed criminal conduct even after he took office.

Mr. Cohen provided several documents to the committee. He offered what he said were financial statements that Mr. Trump gave to institutions such as Deutsche Bank and said the president inflated or deflated his assets when it served his purposes.

He also gave a copy of an article with Mr. Trump’s handwriting on it reporting about an auction of a portrait of himself that he said the president rigged. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump arranged for a bidder to buy the portrait at the auction, then reimbursed the bidder from Mr. Trump’s charitable foundation. The picture hangs in one of Mr. Trump’s country clubs, Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Cohen also offered copies of letters he said he wrote “at Mr. Trump’s direction” threatening his high school, colleges and the College Board not to release his grades or SAT scores.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Michael Cohen Accuses Trump of Expansive Pattern of Lies and Criminality

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer accused him on Wednesday of an expansive pattern of lies and criminality, offering a damning portrayal of life inside the president’s orbit where he said advisers sacrificed integrity for proximity to power.

Michael D. Cohen, who represented Mr. Trump for a decade, told Congress that the president lied to the American public about business interests in Russia during the 2016 campaign and lied to reporters about stolen Democratic emails. Mr. Trump also told Mr. Cohen to lie about illegal hush payments to cover up alleged sexual indiscretions, the lawyer charged.

The allegations, aired at a daylong hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, exposed a dark underside of Mr. Trump’s business and political worlds in the voice of one of the ultimate insiders. Perhaps no close associate of a president has turned on him in front of Congress in such dramatic fashion since John Dean testified against President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

“He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat,” Mr. Cohen said of the president. Mr. Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to lying under oath to Congress, among other crimes, said he did so to protect Mr. Trump. “I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore,” he said.

But it remained unclear whether his testimony would change the political dynamics of a series of scandals that have already polarized Washington and the country and that could lead to an impeachment battle later this year.

Assailing Mr. Cohen as a proven liar, Republicans denounced the hearing as a “charade” and an “embarrassment for our country.” Democrats said Republicans “ran away from the truth” as they sought to defend a corrupt president who has employed “textbook mob tactics.”

As with so many other moments of the Trump era, the hearing seemed to be as much about partisan theater as fact-finding, with the two sides fixed in their views and unbending in their approach. Democrats and Republicans set forth their own conflicting narratives about the man who once served Mr. Trump, either as a dissembling disgruntled former employee trying to reduce his sentence or a fallen sinner who has realized his mistakes and is now trying to redeem himself by coming clean.

Through it all sat Mr. Cohen, 52, with dark circles under his eyes as he awaits a three-year prison term that begins this spring. Apologizing repeatedly to his family, Mr. Cohen described his 10 years working for Mr. Trump as a trip into a world of deceit in which the lawyer ignored his own conscience in order to get close to a magnetic person of power.

“Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” Mr. Cohen said. When he met Mr. Trump, he knew him as “a real estate giant” and “icon” at the center of the action. “Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating,” he said.

In private business, Mr. Cohen said he rationalized Mr. Trump’s dishonesty as “trivial” but as president, he said, “I consider it significant and dangerous.”

Mr. Cohen said he had come to realize that he sacrificed his own ethics and was now seeking redemption for his own misdeeds. “The more people who follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering,” he said. “I lost it all.”

The hearing came while the president was halfway around the world in Vietnam for a meeting with North Korea’s leader. His family and advisers expressed anger at the timing of the hearing, arguing that Democrats were undercutting Mr. Trump in sensitive nuclear diplomacy for political gain.

The president’s re-election campaign organization dismissed Mr. Cohen as a convicted perjurer who should not be believed. “This is the same Michael Cohen who has admitted that he lied to Congress previously,” Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement. “Why did they even bother to swear him in this time?”

Republicans on the committee aggressively challenged Mr. Cohen along the same lines. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican, called Mr. Cohen a “fraudster, cheat, felon and, in two months, a federal inmate.”

Mr. Jordan questioned Mr. Cohen’s motives in assailing Mr. Trump’s character and actions, suggesting that the former lawyer was embittered because the new president did not bring him to Washington.

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“You wanted to work in the White House — ” Mr. Jordan said.

“No, sir,” Mr. Cohen replied.

“ — and didn’t get brought to the dance.”

“I did not want to go to the White House,” Mr. Cohen asserted.

Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, took issue with that on Twitter. “Michael was lobbying EVERYONE to be ‘Chief of Staff,’” he wrote. “It was the biggest joke in the campaign and around the office. Did he just perjure himself again?”

The hearing drew enormous interest on Capitol Hill, where Democrats just last month took control of the House and are under enormous pressure from their liberal base to impeach Mr. Trump. The crowds were huge and the sense of drama palpable. Lawmakers of both parties sat rapt during Mr. Cohen’s 30-minute opening statement as he outlined his accusations.

Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who threatened to reveal what he said were Cohen’s extramarital affairs on Twitter on Tuesday, showed up for the hearing, although he is not on the committee.

Mr. Cohen laid out a series of actions by Mr. Trump that bolster previous allegations and presented documents to corroborate his account, including copies of checks issued by the president or his trust that he said were reimbursements for $130,000 in hush payments Mr. Cohen made to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress who alleged an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Trump, as a candidate, initiated the hush payment plan and, while president, arranged for 11 checks reimbursing the lawyer “as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” a crime to which Mr. Cohen has pleaded guilty.

After news reports about the payments in February 2018, Mr. Cohen told lawmakers, the president called him to discuss what the lawyer should say publicly about the scheme. Mr. Trump told him to say that the president “was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he wasn’t knowledgeable of” Mr. Cohen’s actions.

Democrats pressed Mr. Cohen on whether Mr. Trump provided false financial information to hide the hush payments. Mr. Trump’s annual personal financial disclosure statement in 2017 made no reference to reimbursing Mr. Cohen that year.

But the statement filed by Mr. Trump last year included a footnote indicating a repayment of $100,001 to $250,000 to Mr. Cohen, raising questions about whether the 2017 filing had improperly omitted the debt. While the 2018 statement did not specify the purpose of the payment, it was understood to refer to the hush payment.

“Why do you think the president did not provide the accurate information in his 2017 financial disclosure form?” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Cohen. “What was he trying to hide?

Mr. Cohen said the goal of the payment was to prevent Ms. Daniels from telling her story. “That would have embarrassed the president and it would have interfered with the election,” he said.

Mr. Cohen told lawmakers that Mr. Trump personally monitored negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, asking about it “at least a half-dozen times” between January and June 2016 even while running for president.

“Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,” Mr. Cohen said. “He lied about it because he never expected to win. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.”

In previous testimony before his prosecution by federal authorities, Mr. Cohen lied to Congress by saying the project was dropped by January 2016. Mr. Trump did not explicitly instruct him to lie, Mr. Cohen said, but through his actions he “made clear to me” that “he wanted me to lie” and the president’s lawyers reviewed and even edited Mr. Cohen’s false testimony to Congress.

Mr. Cohen said he had no “direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.” But, he added, “I have my suspicions.”

He pointed to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s eldest son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman; met with visiting Russians after being told that they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

The president has denied knowing about the meeting at the time, but Mr. Cohen cast doubt on that, saying he was in Mr. Trump’s office one day in June 2016 when Donald Jr. came in, went behind his father’s desk and, speaking in a low voice, said, “The meeting is all set.” The candidate, he said, replied, “O.K., good. Let me know.”

Mr. Cohen said that might have referred to the Russia meeting because “Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world” and that his son “would never set up any meeting of significance alone and certainly not without checking with his father.”

Mr. Cohen also recalled being in Mr. Trump’s office shortly before the Democratic National Convention in 2016 when Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser, called. Mr. Trump put him on speaker phone and Mr. Stone reported that he had just spoken with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who said “that within a couple of days there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

“Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of, ‘Wouldn’t that be great?’” Mr. Cohen said.

In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Trump denied speaking with Mr. Stone about WikiLeaks and the emails. Mr. Stone has been charged with obstructing justice, making false statements and witness tampering

Mr. Cohen compared Mr. Trump to a mobster who inflated his net worth, rigged an art auction, frequently used racist language and threatened anyone who got in his way. Mr. Cohen estimated that he had threatened someone at Mr. Trump’s direction perhaps 500 times over 10 years, either berating a “nasty reporter” or warning of lawsuits.

He provided several documents to the committee. He offered what he said were financial statements that Mr. Trump gave to institutions such as Deutsche Bank and said the president inflated or deflated his assets when it served his purposes. He also offered letters he wrote at Mr. Trump’s direction to the president’s high school, colleges and the College Board threatening them not to release his grades during the 2016 campaign.

Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump did not run for president to make the country great, calling it the “greatest infomercial in political history” for his business. “He never expected to win the primary,” he said. “He never expected to win the general election. The campaign, for him, was always a marketing opportunity.”

The former lawyer also described racist conversations in which Mr. Trump asked if he could “name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a shithole” and, while driving through a struggling neighborhood, remarked that only African-Americans could live that way. “He told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid,” Mr. Cohen said.

As the day progressed, Republicans pressed their argument that Mr. Cohen was not to be believed. They argued that he lied even in signing a committee form in which he did not disclose payments he received from a bank in Kazakhstan.

“You’re a pathological liar,” charged Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona.

“Are you referring to me or the president?” Mr. Cohen retorted.

Mr. Cohen suggested that the panel’s Republicans were falling into the trap that he did, trading their honor for a president who did not deserve it.

“I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years,” he said. “I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.”

#Resist

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Testimony From Cohen Could Create New Legal Issues for Trump

WASHINGTON — The dramatic public testimony to Congress on Wednesday morning by President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, could intensify the legal issues facing the president in the criminal and civil investigations that are swirling around him, legal experts said.

Mr. Cohen’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee was a remarkable personal and political rebuke to the president from a lawyer who served Mr. Trump with fierce loyalty for more than a decade.

In his prepared testimony, Mr. Cohen — who has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and will go to prison for his crimes — blasted the president as a “racist,” a “con man” and a “cheat.”

But legal experts said that several of the specific allegations by Mr. Cohen in his opening statement could be relevant to questions about whether Mr. Trump participated in a conspiracy to affect the 2016 election, violated campaign finance laws and obstructed justice in an effort to deflect investigations.

The experts cautioned that nothing Mr. Cohen said in his prepared remarks drastically altered what is known about any legal case against the president. The relevant laws are complex, and the president’s lawyers have repeatedly argued that he did not violate them. And perhaps most important, they note, there is a Justice Department policy that asserts that a president may not be indicted while in office.

Still, Mr. Cohen’s testimony surfaced some new information that could be relevant to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, or other prosecutors investigating cases touching on the president. Here are some examples:

Hush Money Payments to Porn Star
In his prepared remarks, Mr. Cohen described in detail how Mr. Trump personally reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film actress whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, to ensure her silence about an affair with Mr. Trump.

“In February 2017, one month into his presidency, I’m visiting President Trump in the Oval Office for the first time,” Mr. Cohen said. “It’s truly awe-inspiring, he’s showing me around and pointing to different paintings, and he says to me something to the effect of ‘Don’t worry, Michael, your January and February reimbursement checks are coming. They were FedExed from New York and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system.’”

Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said prosecutors could use Mr. Cohen’s description of the payments from Mr. Trump to bolster a charge of campaign finance violations.

“To the extent that these were illegal campaign finance contributions, which were reimbursed and not reported, here is more evidence that Trump was conspiring to violate campaign finance laws as president,” Mr. Hasen said.

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He noted, however, that campaign finance laws — which are complex — require proof that a person was willfully violating the laws. Mr. Cohen’s testimony does not prove that Mr. Trump knew that the payments he was making were illegal — something that prosecutors would have to prove if they wanted to charge the president.

What the President Knew About WikiLeaks
In his testimony, Mr. Cohen described a moment when he said Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s top political operatives, called the president to tell him about a conversation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“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. Cohen said. “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.”

Mr. Cohen added: “Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great.’”

Legal experts cautioned that just proving that Mr. Trump knew about the WikiLeaks plans to leak damaging documents ahead of time would not necessarily prove that the president or his campaign were guilty of conspiracy. Prosecutors would have to prove that Mr. Trump and the campaign actively engaged in coordinating with Russians to distribute the documents or took other actions to affect the outcome of the election.

The question of contacts between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign is central to the issue of whether there was any conspiracy between the campaign and Russia. It is not known what Mr. Trump might have told Mr. Mueller’s team about what, if anything, he knew about WikiLeaks’ plans or about contacts between Mr. Stone and Mr. Assange.

Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, said that if Mr. Cohen is telling the truth, and if Mr. Trump claimed to Mr. Mueller in his sworn, written testimony that he was not aware of any contacts between Mr. Stone and Mr. Assange, that could be a crime.

“When you lie in that context, it’s not only perjury but it’s obstruction of justice too,” Mr. Zeidenberg said.

WikiLeaks Campaign Finance Violations
Mr. Cohen’s testimony about Mr. Stone’s conversation with Mr. Trump could also open the president up to further campaign finance violations, Mr. Hasen said.

Federal law bars campaigns from taking anything of value from foreign entities. The conversation with Mr. Stone could be used to help prove that Mr. Trump and his campaign knowingly accepted valuable help from WikiLeaks in his efforts to defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“If it’s true that Stone was directly in communication with Assange while also communicating with Trump and the Trump campaign, there’s the potential for a violation of the campaign finance laws involving foreign contributions,” Mr. Hasen said.

He was quick to point out that prosecutors would need to have more evidence than just the conversation between Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump. “There are a lot more steps that we would need to conclude that Trump or the Trump campaign acted illegally with regard to WikiLeaks.”

Trump Tower Moscow
In his prepared remarks, Mr. Cohen disputed a report  this year from BuzzFeed that Mr. Trump explicitly directed him to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow — an allegation that could lead to criminal charges if true.

“Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates,” Mr. Cohen said.

But Mr. Cohen added that the president implicitly instructed him to lie about the Moscow deal by repeatedly lying about it himself.

“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,” Mr. Cohen said.

Legal experts said the law does not require prosecutors to prove that Mr. Trump explicitly told Mr. Cohen to lie to Congress. But they also said that any effort to obscure the timing of the negotiations over the construction project could be used as evidence of motive in efforts to build a conspiracy case against the president.

“If you’re going to make a case of conspiracy with the Russians, that’s going to be front and center,” Mr. Zeidenberg said.

Knowledge of Trump Tower Meeting
Mr. Cohen testified that he overheard a conversation that he believes proves that Mr. Trump knew about a campaign meeting between his top campaign aides and people connected with Russians.

“I recalled Don Jr. leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying: ‘The meeting is all set.’ I remember Mr. Trump saying, ‘O.K. good … let me know,’” Mr. Cohen said.

The president’s knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting has been at the center of questions about whether his campaign conspired with Russians to affect the outcome of the presidential election. Legal experts said Mr. Cohen’s testimony could be relevant to any case that might be built against the president by Mr. Mueller.

Violations of Laws Governing Trump Charity
In his remarks, Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump directed him to use Trump Foundation funds to acquire a portrait of Mr. Trump.

“The portrait was purchased by the fake bidder for $60,000,” Mr. Cohen said. “Mr. Trump directed the Trump Foundation, which is supposed to be a charitable organization, to repay the fake bidder, despite keeping the art for himself.”

Legal experts said that could be a civil violation of state laws governing the way charitable foundations operate. Mr. Trump’s foundation has already been under investigation for its operations, including similar purchases of another portrait.

Last December, the foundation announced it would shut down permanently after the New York attorney general accused it of “functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”

#Resist

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The huge disconnect at the core of the GOP defense of Trump

There’s a strange, gaping disconnect at the core of the Republican performance at the ongoing congressional hearing about Michael Cohen and President Trump.

On one hand, Republicans have, so far, spent every second they could find pointing to all the reasons that nobody should believe a single word Cohen says about anything.

But if Cohen, who was Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer for a decade, and is now cooperating with the special counsel’s inquiry, was really as woefully lacking in credibility as Republicans claim, then why wouldn’t their House Oversight Committee members also be using all their time interrogating the specific claims that Cohen is making about Trump himself?

After all, by their own lights, you can’t believe anything Cohen says. And this is the best — and probably only — chance they’ll have to go one-on-one with Cohen. So why not grab on to this unique chance to demonstrate for the whole world to see that Cohen’s many allegations also can’t be believed?

One after another, Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing attacked Cohen’s credibility in every conceivable way they could. They pointed to his long history of duplicity, browbeating, bullying and threats (never mind that a good deal of this was on behalf of Trump himself) and claimed that Cohen was really setting himself up for a lucrative TV career after all this is over.

But ask yourself this: How much time did they spend cross-examining Cohen about the many substantive claims he made in his testimony?

Consider some of the big revelations of the day. Cohen alleged that he overheard Trump on a phone call with Roger Stone, who gave him a heads-up on a coming Wikileaks email dump. At the hearing, Cohen elaborated, claiming he’d overheard this conversation on speaker phone. He even said that he believed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III may have corroborating information about this.

I cannot recall any serious effort by Republicans to cross-examine Cohen about these matters — say, by quizzing on specifics to try to catch him in an inconsistency.

Cohen also flatly declared that he was given 11 checks from Trump himself, or from an account controlled by Trump, to reimburse Cohen for the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, which appear to be at the core of a criminal conspiracy. Cohen also said Donald Trump Jr. signed one check, and that Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was in the room while Trump discussed this conspiracy.

I cannot recall any serious effort by Republicans to cross-examine Cohen about those things, either.

Cohen also said Trump’s lawyers edited his original statement to Congress — in which he falsified the timeline of negotiations over Trump’s Moscow project, leading him to plead guilty — to change its “message” about that timeline. In fairness, Democrats were not able to draw out too much about this, and it’s still crying out for more explanation. But Republicans did not spend much time on this topic, either.

Republicans also spent very little time pressing Cohen on a claim that you might think he’d actually be very vulnerable on: The assertion that Trump communicated to him that he should lie about the Moscow project without saying so. This is a hard claim to defend on its face, so you’d think Republicans would be all over it. But they weren’t, at least not much.

One Republican committee member — Rep. Greg Steube of Florida — did press on this a bit. But he then drifted into an insane line of inquiry, pressing Cohen on whether those 11 checks actually were for reimbursing hush-money payments. This is odd, since Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has conceded that Trump did reimburse that money.

Republicans spent all their time impugning Cohen’s credibility, while showing virtually no interest in learning anything about the explosive allegations Cohen made. As Brian Beutler says, there is a sinister dimension to this:



But the other side of this coin is that they didn’t make any serious efforts to actually shoot the allegations down.

It’s not difficult to see why: The problem for Republicans is that many of Cohen’s core claims are verifiable in one way or another. Either there are 11 checks from Trump’s accounts reimbursing the hush money, or there aren’t (Cohen has vowed to turn them over to Congress). Either Weisselberg was in the room with Trump discussing the hush-money scheme, or he wasn’t (he was granted immunity, and has surely testified to this point already).

This is why Republicans were forced to resort to their other play of the day, claiming that the fact that the hearing is taking place at all is a travesty of justice because, after all — and note the boomerang logic here — Cohen is, of course, a proven serial liar, so why are we wasting time hearing from him at all? Needless to say, Republicans couldn’t treat this hearing as an opportunity to shed more light on what he’s actually claiming.

Of course, there was no need to go hard at the specifics, because the more lurid and outsize claims are guaranteed to bring in right-wing media adulation.

Indeed, two of the Republicans at the hearing — Reps. Mark Meadows (N.C.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) — have specialized in making particularly wild claims about the Russia investigation, and, as Politico recently reported, this has led Trump to single them out by name as “warriors," which has rocketed them to stardom in the right-wing media ecosystem.

But this also shows how the incentives dictated by the Republican closed information feedback loop sometimes work against the GOP cause.

The failure to show any serious interest at all in the allegations against Trump is, of course, a startling abdication of responsibility, given their gravity. But Republicans didn’t even use the hearing as an occasion to examine Cohen’s claims in a manner that might benefit Trump, at least outside the right-wing media audience. So this also stands a demonstration of the weakness of their position — and, by extension, that of Trump himself.

#Resist

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The question of Michael Cohen’s lie to Congress gets more complex: He blames Trump’s attorneys

According to documents associated with a plea agreement reached with the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, it was on Aug. 28, 2017, that Michael Cohen sent a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence committees about his interactions with his former legal client President Trump.

Among the claims in that letter, Cohen asserted that conversations about a prospective real estate development in Moscow ended in January 2016, before the Republican primaries began. “By the end of January 2016, I determined that the proposal was not feasible for a variety of business reasons,” his statement read, “and should not be pursued further.”

This was a lie. As Cohen later admitted, conversations continued until June of that year. Presented with this conflict by Mueller, Cohen agreed to plead guilty to a charge of filing a false statement.

Last month, BuzzFeed News reported that Cohen’s lie about when the Moscow project ended was directed by Trump himself and that Cohen had informed Mueller’s team about that direction. The special counsel’s office, in an unprecedented step, denied that report.

Cohen’s arrival on Capitol Hill this week promised to offer more insight on how his incorrect statement was formulated. And so it did Wednesday.

In his prepared remarks, Cohen said that Trump never told him specifically to lie about the proposed Moscow deal but that Trump “in his way” indicated that he wanted Cohen to be dishonest about it. But in the statement, he also offered a more tantalizing explanation: “Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it.”

In questions posed by Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, Cohen offered more details. Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) was the first to broach the issue.

“You said you lied to Congress about Trump’s negotiations to build his Moscow tower because he’d made it clear to you that he wanted you to lie,” Raskin said.

He noted Cohen’s statement about the role of Trump’s lawyers.

“So this is a pretty breathtaking claim, and I just want to get to the facts here,” Raskin continued. “Which specific lawyers reviewed and edited your statement to Congress on the Moscow tower negotiations, and did they make any changes to your statement?”

"There were changes made, additions,” Cohen said. “Jay Sekulow for one” — referring to Trump's personal attorney handling the investigations into Russian interference.

"Were there questions about the timing?” Raskin asked.

“There were several changes that were made, including how we were going to handle that message,” Cohen replied. “Which was — the message, of course, being the length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive.”

"That was one of the changes?” Raskin said.

"Yes,” Cohen replied.

Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) returned to the subject a bit later.

"Who at the White House reviewed your testimony?” Sarbanes asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Cohen replied. “The document was originally created by myself along with my attorney at the time. … There was a joint defense agreement, so the document circulated around. I believe it was also reviewed by Abbe Lowell, who represents Ivanka [Trump] and Jared Kushner.”

"Why did you provide the testimony to the White House?” Sarbanes asked.

"It was pursuant to the joint defense agreement that we were all operating under,” Cohen said.

This is an important point. Many of Trump’s allies in the investigations into his campaign and possible coordination with Russia have at some point been involved in a joint defense agreement. Normally, interactions between a client and an attorney are kept private. Upon entering into a joint defense agreement, that pool essentially expands outward, with information shared among the pool of attorneys and clients.

In other words, Cohen, before submitting his testimony, sent it to that pool for review. When he got it back, changes had been made.

“What were the edits that came back substantively?” Sarbanes then asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Cohen replied. “I’d have to take a look at the document.” In response to a later question, Cohen suggested he would be happy to provide his original statement.

"Did you have a reaction to why there might not have been, in a sense, a protest to what was going to be false testimony that was going to be provided to the Intelligence Committee?” Sarbanes asked.

“No, sir, because the goal was to stay on message,” Cohen replied. “It’s just limit the relationship whatsoever with Russia. It was short. There’s no Russian contacts. There’s no Russian collusion. There’s no Russian deals. That’s the message. That’s the message that existed well before my need to come and testify.”

“I toed the party line,” Cohen later added, “and I’m now suffering, and I’m going to continue to suffer for a while along with my family, so, yes.”

A bit later, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) put a fine point on the question. Who were the attorneys who edited the document?

“Jay Sekulow,” Cohen replied. “I believe Abbe Lowell, as well.”

The implication of this is significant. First, it distances Cohen from culpability — though, of course, he’s still responsible for submitting a statement he knew to be untrue. More broadly, it gets to the question posed by BuzzFeed’s initial report. Changing that bit of information could suggest a deliberate effort to mislead Congress, which could be seen as obstruction of justice.

How Sekulow or Lowell decided to make that change — assuming Cohen’s presentation is accurate — is important. Perhaps it was a function of a misunderstanding about when the project ended, a misunderstanding that Cohen believed was intentional. Or perhaps it was an intentional effort to downplay the significance of the deal. If that was the case, it’s important to know why Sekulow or Lowell would have made that change. If Sekulow made it — and it was at the direction of Trump — the president is again implicated in questions about obstruction.

It’s worth noting another comment from Cohen later in the testimony.

Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.) asked why pursuit of the Moscow tower ended.

“Because he won the presidency,” Cohen replied.

Trump hadn’t won the presidency in June 2016, the point at which we currently understand the deal to have fallen apart. Another Trump attorney, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, has on two occasions suggested that the conversations about the Moscow tower may have extended to November.

Put another way, the full story is still unclear.

#Resist

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Michael Cohen’s hearing was explosive — but not for what was new

FORMER TRUMP lawyer Michael Cohen’s Wednesday hearing before the House Oversight Committee was explosive not for what was new — but, depressingly, what was not new to anyone watching this administration with clear eyes. The takeaway: President Trump is a liar with a defective character — and, possibly, a criminal.

Corroborating allegations previously revealed in court documents, the president’s former fixer said Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the felony campaign finance violation to which Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump asked him to pay adult-film star Stephanie Clifford $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to keep her silent about an alleged affair. Mr. Cohen provided a copy of a check, signed by the president, reimbursing him for the illegal payoff. “I am going to jail in part because of my decision to help Mr. Trump hide that payment from the American people before they voted a few days later,” Mr. Cohen said. “He knew about everything.”

Mr. Cohen also insisted that Mr. Trump got advance notice in July 2016 from GOP trickster Roger Stone that WikiLeaks was planning to publish documents damaging to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. If true, this means that Mr. Trump lied to the country when he denied ever speaking with Mr. Stone, who is now under indictment, about WikiLeaks.

Mr. Cohen offered a similar account of the president’s dishonesty on the question of whether Mr. Trump pursued a Trump Tower in Moscow during the campaign. “Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,” Mr. Cohen said. He stipulated that Mr. Trump did not order him to lie to Congress about the matter, as Mr. Cohen did, but explained that he “made clear to me, through his personal statements to me that we both knew were false and through his lies to the country, that he wanted me to lie.”

In other words, according to Mr. Cohen, the president’s record of lies and concealment is substantial, and on far weightier issues than misstating a fact here or there. This is not the truth-bending that used to pass as normal for Washington politicians, but dishonesty that is far more breathtaking.

Mr. Cohen’s also offered a dishearteningly believable account of Mr. Trump’s character. Calling the president “a racist,” “a conman” and “a cheat,” Mr. Cohen recounted that “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.”

For their part, Republicans spent nearly all of their time attacking Mr. Cohen rather than defending the president — with one going so far as to childishly recite the rhyme, “liar, liar, pants on fire.” Yet Mr. Cohen repeatedly admitted guilt and apologized for his own role in the activities he described.

Rather than ignore Mr. Cohen’s allegations, House Republicans might have taken his warning, learned over a decade carrying water for the president: “The more people that follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

#Resist

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Meanwhile in Witness-Intimidationville...

Rep. Matt Gaetz insists he didn’t threaten Michael Cohen. The Florida Bar is now investigating.

The Florida Bar is investigating Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who is licensed to practice law in the state, for his incendiary tweet accusing Michael Cohen of infidelity.

On Tuesday, he tweeted, “Hey @MichaelCohen212 — Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot.”

Hours after he posted the message, Gaetz apologized and deleted it, insisting that he did not intend to threaten President Trump’s former lawyer on the eve of his highly anticipated testimony before Congress.

“The Florida Bar is aware of the comments made in a tweet yesterday by Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is a Florida Bar member, and I can confirm we have opened an investigation,” spokeswoman Francine Andía Walker said in a statement to The Washington Post.

After the investigation, the bar will decide whether to file charges against Gaetz with the Florida Supreme Court, Walker said. “If rules have been violated, the Florida Bar will vigorously pursue appropriate discipline,” she said, declining to comment further.

In an email to The Post, a spokesperson for Gaetz downplayed the regulatory agency’s investigation.

"It seems that the Florida Bar, by its rules, is required to investigate even the most frivolous of complaints,” said Jillian Lane Wyant, Gaetz’s chief of staff.

In the tweet in question, Gaetz suggested without evidence that Cohen, who is married, had “girlfriends,” prompting some legal observers and Democrats to accuse the Florida Republican of engaging in witness tampering. About seven hours later, he issued a mea culpa in a tweet addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had earlier issued a statement obliquely admonishing the congressman.

“While it is important 2 create context around the testimony of liars like Michael Cohen, it was NOT my intent to threaten, as some believe I did,” he wrote just before midnight. “I’m deleting the tweet & should have chosen words that better showed my intent. I’m sorry.”

The apology may not appease Democrats, who demanded action against Gaetz. Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) sent an official request to the chairman and ranking Republican of the House Ethics Committee on Tuesday asking them to open an investigation into Gaetz. Rice suggested that his tweet may violate a federal statute against witness tampering and intimidation.

“After the House Committee on Ethics thoroughly investigates this matter, I urge you to make any and all appropriate referrals to DOJ,” Rice wrote in the letter.

Gaetz, a staunch Trump ally who frequents the Fox News circuit to defend the president, has a history of making inflammatory remarks and pushing conspiracy theories, such as claims that Democrats in Florida tried to steal the November midterms with illegal ballots. In 2018, he invited a right-wing Internet troll as his guest to the State of the Union address and appeared on a radio show hosted by Alex Jones of Infowars.

When The Post reached Gaetz by phone after he sent the tweet, he made no apologies, maintaining that his message wasn’t meant to intimidate Cohen, but rather to question his truthfulness.

“Challenging the credibility and veracity of a witness is something that happens every day in America,” he said, “and we need more of that in Congress when people intend to come and lie to us.”

Democrats have charged that Trump, his subordinates and other Republicans have been trying to silence Cohen as he has turned on his former boss. On Tuesday, Gaetz took to the House floor to question whether Cohen even “lies to his own family,” saying his “web of lies are not to be believed.”

But Gaetz’s tweet drew swift rebuke from Democrats and legal observers, who argued that he crossed a line.

“This isn’t a scene from Godfather II,” Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) tweeted at Gaetz. “Witness intimidation is not going to work.”

“Hey @mattgaetz: Do you know about 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b), which prohibits tampering with witnesses to official proceedings?” Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, wrote on Twitter, mimicking Gaetz’s tweet to Cohen.

“Hey @mattgaetz,” began Ryan Goodman, former special counsel to the Defense Department and now a New York University law professor. “Does your personal attorney know you’ve just engaged, very clearly, in the crime of witness tampering? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat.”

Pelosi did not directly condemn Gaetz’s tweet. But in a statement issued on Twitter to all House members around 6 p.m., she said: “I encourage all Members to be mindful that comments made on social media or in the press can adversely affect the ability of House Committees to obtain the truthful and complete information necessary to fulfill their duties.”

She urged that the House Ethics Committee “should vigilantly monitor these types of statements,” which she said may not be constitutionally protected speech.

Gaetz apologized and deleted his tweet about six hours later.

Cohen testified Wednesday morning before the House Oversight Committee and called Trump “a racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat” who had advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks plot to publish stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Republicans in turn questioned Cohen’s credibility. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December after being convicted of financial crimes and lying to Congress, in what U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III described as a “veritable smorgasbord of criminal conduct.”

Cohen testified Wednesday that he lied to Congress in previous testimony about Trump’s business dealings in Moscow. He also said Trump did not directly instruct him to lie but implicitly suggested that he should.

In a statement Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, “It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word.”

#Resist

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There is an irony in Sarah Sanders who is paid to lie, for her lying boss, complaining about another liar.

#Resist

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#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist