THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The most damaging aspect of Cohen's testimony for Trump concerned the president's involvement in two offense patterns to which Cohen has pleaded guilty. The first of these was Trump's involvement in the payments Cohen coordinated to Stephanie Clifford (better known as Stormy Daniels) and Karen McDougal--the matter regarding which Cohen originally pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York on charges of campaign finance violations. Prosecutors have already alleged that Cohen "acted in coordination with and at the direction of" Trump himself in making those payments. But Cohen's testimony provided unmistakable evidence of direct, personal involvement by Trump in the scheme--first as a presidential candidate and, perhaps most significantly, continuing months after he swore the oath of office.

Cohen testified in response to questions by Rep. Katie Hill that he received payments over the course of 2017, drawn either from Trump's personal account or from his trust account. He promised that he could provide copies of all checks to Congress. Along with his written testimony, he included a copy of a check Trump had written him from his personal bank account reimbursing Cohen for the Daniels and McDougal payments--from August 2017, well into Trump's presidency. He also included a check from the trust account dated to March 2017, which Cohen identified to Chairman Elijah Cummings as signed by Donald Trump, Jr. and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg.

The timing of the checks is important for two reasons. The first is legal. Technically speaking, under federal election law, the balance Trump owed Cohen at any given time could constitute an ongoing illegal contribution by Cohen. Leaving aside the problem of indicting a president while he remains in office, any prosecutor seeking to bring a case against Trump would need to prove that he had "knowingly and willfully" violated the law, and that is far from clear. But it is noteworthy that the president's potential criminal exposure in the Daniels and McDougal matter now extends beyond his time as a private citizen into his tenure as a public official.

On this note, Cohen's opening testimony describes an exchange with Trump in the Oval Office in February 2017 in which Trump assures him that his reimbursement checks are on their way: "They were FedExed from New York," Cohen paraphrases him as saying, "and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system." In other words, the president of the United States was signing those checks--made out to his personal fixer in exchange for paying off two women for their silence regarding sexual relationships with him--in the White House itself.

This points to the second reason why the timing is important. Cohen's testimony makes clear that the president repeatedly lied to the American people and made efforts to ensure the public would not find out the truth. After signing some of those checks to Cohen in the White House, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he knew nothing about the Daniels payment in April 2018. In an exchange with Hill, Cohen said that Trump had called him just two months earlier, in February 2018, to ensure that Cohen would tell reporters that Trump had had no knowledge of or involvement in the reimbursements or Cohen's original payments to Daniels. This systematic deception may not be a legal problem for the president, but it is a moral affront and a breach of his responsibility as the leader of the country.

 

The second area involves Cohen's allegation that Trump indirectly encouraged him to lie to Congress about the abortive Trump Tower Moscow project--the subject of Cohen's second guilty plea, this time to the special counsel's office. This was the subject of the BuzzFeed News story alleging that Trump personally directed Cohen to lie to Congress about the date the Moscow project was terminated in order to hide Trump's involvement. That story caused a fracas when Mueller's office broke its customary silence to issue a rare statement denying unspecified aspects of the story: "BuzzFeed's description of specific statements to the Special Counsel's Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's Congressional testimony are not accurate."

Cohen's testimony begins to square this particular circle, claiming that Trump made his desire clear without explicitly "directing" Cohen to lie, and that Cohen followed what he took to be an instruction. In his prepared statement, Cohen says that Trump had made clear to him over months what the party line was--saying to him that there was no business in Russia even as he supervised Cohen's efforts to build a tower there. Moreover, Cohen writes, "Mr. Trump's personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it," referring to the August 2017 letter Cohen submitted to the House and Senate intelligence committees, which contained the false assertion that the negotiations ended in January 2016. Cohen continues, "Mr. Trump had 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" about the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. "And he made it clear to me because his personal attorneys reviewed my statement before I gave it to Congress."

Speaking at the hearing, Cohen told Rep. John Sarbanes that Trump's lawyers had access to Cohen's statement to Congress circulated because of Cohen's joint defense agreement with Trump, but said that he couldn't recall the nature of the edits. He identified both Trump's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow and Jared Kushner's lawyer Abbe Lowell as having reviewed the statement, and told Rep. Jamie Raskin that review by the president's team led to changes in "how we were going to handle that message, ... the length of time that the Trump Tower Moscow project stayed and remained alive." He said he would try to provide the committee with an original draft of his statement from before the edits.

Notably, Sekulow contested Cohen's testimony, saying in a statement that "[t]oday's testimony by Michael Cohen that attorneys for the President edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false."

But there's another element of Cohen's testimony: He also stated during questioning by Rep. Gerry Connolly that he and Sekulow met with President Trump and specifically discussed the statement and impending testimony before the House intelligence committee. What did the president say? "He wanted me to cooperate. He also wanted just to ensure by making this statement--and I said it in my testimony--there is no collusion. There is no deal. He goes, 'It's all a witch hunt.'"

"At the end of the day, I knew exactly what he wanted me to say," Cohen testified.

In other words, if Cohen is telling the truth, the president encouraged his false statements both in the general sense that he articulated the lies that became the party line Cohen was meant to represent and in the more specific sense that he met with Cohen in the run-up to the statement and testimony, reiterated the false party line, and then had his attorneys review and refine Cohen's statement to help reflect that line.

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