WHAT ABOUT URANIUM ONE?

Cohen is a man with nothing to lose and the benefit of painful hindsight that his role as Trump's attorney didn't shield him from the corruption and collapse of anyone who works for Trump.  

Cohen will not be asked to testify about candidate Trump's lust for an eponymous tower project in Moscow. Nor will be he asked about Trump's ludicrously amateur efforts to bribe Russian President Vladimir Putin with a penthouse there, or about any quid pro quo between the Trump campaign, the Trump organization, and their friends in Moscow. That's not relief for Trump, by the way; the president knows Cohen has already given all that up to Mueller and company.

All this is why the Trump world is in a flaming panic over Cohen's testimony tomorrow. When Donald Trump Jr.--a man who increasingly looks like a 1980s B-movie villain, all shiny suits and a surfeit of hair product--took to Fox and Friends this week, he was immediately on this dumb message, about how the probe of his pop is "as political as it gets," as it's the "dream" of those mean old feds to "try to find something to get Trump."

Of course, Trump and his allies are taking precisely the wrong approach. Calling Cohen names, or having pals in Congress direct mobster threats at the witness, doesn't discredit him.  It makes him more credible because the things he's saying are things that the Southern District and Mueller have matched up with more legitimate sources. The feds don't just have Cohen. They have Allen Weisselberg, the Trump organization's accountant and CFO.

As in all mob cases from time immemorial, once you take out the consigliere, then you take out the accountant, and the whole house of cards tumbles down.

Trump's media allies on Fox and elsewhere have been in overdrive the last few days, shocked that anyone would believe a serial liar like Cohen. For them, truth and character suddenly matter, and any word from Cohen's mouth is the fruit of the most poisonous tree. Like aides to Stalin being airbrushed out of the picture after being disappeared to the gulag, Cohen's unpersoning is proceeding apace.

Tweet   @brothersjudd