Michael Cohen, the former attorney for President Trump, opened his testimony yesterday with three claims about his former employer:
He is a racist.
He is a conman.
He is a cheat.
Despite these putative shortcomings, Cohen continued working for Trump until the never-ending Deep State effort to bring down Trump nailed Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to multiple crimes, including lying to Congress.
And so yesterday, a convicted and confessed liar swore to tell the truth.
And, apparently, lied again.
Cohen’s First Lie
The former fixer who has pleaded guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and lying to a financial institution and Congress, did not produce a shred of evidence that Trump “colluded” with the Russians to win the 2016 election.
But he well may have proved that he still doesn’t tell the truth, even after being convicted for lying in the same venue.
One almost-certain lie surfaced in an exchange with Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who grilled Cohen with a lengthy list of his crimes, then stated that Cohen turned on Trump because the president didn’t give Cohen a job in the White House:
Jordan: How long did you work in the White House?
Cohen: I never worked in the White House.
Jordan: That’s the point, isn’t it, Mr. Cohen?… You wanted to work in the White House, but you didn’t get brought to the dance.
Cohen: No sir.
After telling Jordan that he was “extremely proud to be personal attorney to the president of the United States of America,” Cohen stated that he was uninterested in working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs. I can tell you a story of Mr. Trump reaming out Reince Priebus because I had not taken a job where Mr. Trump wanted me to, which was working with Don McGahn at the White House general counsel.”
Cohen said he was not working at the White House because it cost Trump his attorney-client privilege.
But CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that Cohen’s claim isn’t true, that Cohen did, once again, lie to Congress. “I think the issue there is that one sentence: ‘I did not want to go to the White House.’ All of our reporting suggests that’s not true.”
Appearing with Tapper, the anti-Trump network’s Dana Bash said she spoke to Priebus.
“His comment was no comment,” Bash said. “He said I’m not getting involved in this and we, of course, witnessed this real time that this president, probably more than any other, if he wants somebody in the White House, they’re there.”
Nor is that what prosecutors who extracted a guilty plea from Cohen have said. They say Cohen was angling for a job in the White House.
Cohen’s sentencing memo from federal prosecutors in New York, as Jordan told Fox News’s Bret Baier after the contentious hearing, says Cohen “expected to be given a prominent role and title in the new administration. When that did not materialize, Cohen found a way to monetize his relationship with an access to the President.”
Tweeted Eric Trump, “Michael was lobbying EVERYONE to be ‘Chief of Staff.’ It was the biggest joke in the campaign and around the office. Did he just perjure himself again?”
Lie No. 2
Another possible lie from Cohen came in his opening statement and concerned the WikiLeaks dump of e-mails “that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
Cohen claimed that he listened to a conversation between Trump and former adviser Roger Stone, the veteran GOP hitman, in which they discussed the WikiLeaks release that would land on July 22. During that phone call a few days before the dump, Cohen testified, Stone told Trump that he, Stone, spoke to WikiLeaks chieftain Julian Assange, who said the dump was forthcoming.
But according to the Washington Post, “in a text message, Stone said, “Mr. Cohen’s statement is not true.” He has previously told the Post that the two “never discussed WikiLeaks.”
Another problem for Cohen? Assange, the other party to the conversation Cohen claimed he overheard, denies it. And the organization had already disclosed more than 30,000 of Clinton’s e-mails before the conversation Cohen claims he heard.
Tweeted WikiLeaks: “WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has never had a telephone call with Roger Stone. WikiLeaks publicly teased its pending publications on Hillary Clinton and published > 30k of her emails on 16 March 2016.”
“I don’t think you can trust anything he says,” Jordan told Baier. “This was the first step in the Democrats’ crazy impeachment plans.”
Photo: AP Images
