Donald Trump and Michael Cohen Somehow Implicated in Another Alleged Federal Crime
In the latest revelation of presidential criminality that at once feels like a historical inflection point while surprising exactly no one, BuzzFeed News reports that Donald Trump directed longtime personal attorney and celebrated social-media maven Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his involvement in negotiations for a potential nine-figure deal to build Trump Tower Moscow. Of the president's many diligent attempts to break various laws, any of which might merit impeachment and removal on its own, we now add "suborning perjury" to the top of the list.
During the 2016 campaign, the candidate insisted he had no business deals in Russia, a mantra he has repeated since ascending to the White House. According to two unnamed "federal law enforcement officials" with whom BuzzFeed News spoke, however, Cohen provided the president and his children with "very detailed updates" at regular intervals. After his unexpected victory, which rendered his efforts to capitalize on campaign-related publicity to make hundreds of millions of dollars deeply problematic, Trump instructed Cohen to tell lawmakers that the negotiations ended months earlier than they did. And although Cohen maintains what could charitably be described as a complicated relationship with the truth, law enforcement's conclusion does not rely only on his word.
The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
If the details of his story prove accurate—and these reporters have been right about big ones before—it is, from a legal perspective, a reasonably open-and-shut case of a government official abusing their power to obstruct justice, which is the same offense that prompted Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 and Bill Clinton's impeachment some 25 years later. (Notably, although The New York Times has done fantastic reporting during the Trump presidency, some of the most consequential stories have come from outlets that do not depend so heavily on access to anonymous White House sources.)
House Judiciary chair Jerry Nadler and House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff have already announced that they will launch dueling investigations into the allegations. And after two years of tiptoeing around the subject as if the act of mentioning it amounted to ipso facto Washington heresy, a startling number of Democratic lawmakers are throwing around impeachment-adjacent vocabulary with abandon this morning.
Impeachment is an inherently political process, though, which means that even if the Democrat-controlled House were to take action—whether based on the results of their investigations, or on Robert Mueller's investigations, or on a fairly straightforward reading of the president's tweets—Trump's fate would still rest in the damp reptilian hands of Mitch McConnell, for whom no evidence of wrongdoing would ever be damning enough to prompt him to convict a Republican president. Some of the Senate's more historically outspoken critics of presidents who obstruct justice, however, should prepare to be confronted with lots of old clips of them shouting indignantly in the weeks to come.
Another person who might have some creative explaining to do?
Ivanka Trump was slated to manage a spa at the tower and personally recommended an architect. She also instructed Cohen to speak with a Russian athlete who offered “synergy on a government level” to get the Moscow project off the ground, in another aspect of the deal first revealed by BuzzFeed News that later was affirmed by the special counsel’s sentencing memo. Cohen rebuffed the athlete’s proposal, which angered Ivanka Trump, according to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News.
For those of you hoping to see one or more adult Trump children staring solemnly up at a judge before this is all over, there is hope yet.
