I don’t think today’s testimony changed anyone’s mind. If you’ve been paying attention, none of this is new or surprising. If you haven’t been paying attention, you probably didn’t watch this.
Either way, Trump supporters will just write today’s testimony off as a bunch of deep state lies, fake news or whatever.
So here are the highlights from the hearing. I’m focused on areas of criminal liability:
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Cohen admitted that he met with Trump, Jay Sekulow to discuss his testimony to Congress in advance (Gerry Connolly and others). Trump reiterated the false talking point that he expected Cohen to align to. That’s subornation of perjury. More than that, Cohen shared the draft of his statement with Sekulow and Abbe Lowell (!!!). They edited that document and focused specifically on the material issue of the timeline. The main false message was that TT Moscow discussions ended in Jan 2016 before the Iowa caucuses. That was a lie. They stayed alive through Election Day. This not only proves Buzzfeed’s point, but it also implicates members of Trump’s legal and political team in a conspiracy to suborn perjury.
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Cohen has a very good memory of the conversation on July 17 or 18, 2016 between Roger Stone and Trump on the speaker phone in which Stone relayed to Trump that Wikileaks had DNC data and was about to do a release. He also said on more than 1 occasion that the Special Counsel likely has the evidence to substantiate the Trump-Stone conversation. The date is significant because that is the exact date that wikileaks received data from GRU (this is in the GRU indictment). This confirms that Roger Stone was connected and almost real-time to the discussions that the Russians were having with WikiLeaks to use WikiLeaks as a release point for stolen DNC/Clinton campaign emails. In addition, in the following week (during the middle of the democratic convention) when
Trump made his “Russia if you’re listening” statement, he knew that there was a connection between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Transactions in this regard are part of a criminal conspiracy. He knew the Russians and WikiLeaks had a thing going on to hack and release emails. He encouraged it, never reported it to the FBI, and saw to take advantage of it when his campaign needed the help. Again, I have a hard time believing that the special counsel would allow Cohen to speak on this matter if they didn’t have indictments lined up. I don’t think that Cohen would’ve even spoken about the Stone-Trump conversation this much unless the OSC had the evidence to back it up. I don’t think this makes it into the statement or hearing otherwise. -
The Democrats and others (including Amash) did a good job of getting Cohen to explain how Trump induces people to lie and suborns perjury. This is very mob like and is the kind of thing that people like Mueller have been prosecuting for a long time.
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Katie Hill got Cohen to admit that Trump coordinated and directed false statements made by Cohen to the media about the Stormy Daniels matter. Others elicited from Cohen an admission that Trump was fully aware as to how Cohen was to be reimbursed for the payments, and how stormy Daniels and Karen McDougall were to be paid off. He also confirms that Trump’s primary motivation for keeping the payment secret was to prevent a political controversy from corrupting days before the vote. In other words, Individual-1 has met the threshold for criminal liability under the campaign finance laws. This is why the SDNY named Individual-1 in the Cohen charging documents.
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Harley Rouda gets Cohen to admit that Trump lied under oath in a civil trial about Felix Sater’s role in the Trump Org. Sater even had an office on the 26th floor where Trump had his office. Cohen took over Sater’s office after Sater left.
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Cohen admits that he is working with the SDNY on several other investigations, including at least one involving Trump (feels like more though). It is tied to Trump’s communications with Cohen about 2 months following the FBI raid (this would be in June 2018). (Raja Krishnamoorthi and others).
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Cohen admits that David Pecker ran a hush money scheme with Donald Trump for years relating to women and several other matters. (Carolyn Maloney and others).
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Roger Stone has likely violated his gag order by making at least 2 comments on his case relating to Cohen’s testimony. The reason his attorney didn’t make a statement? Probably because what Roger said is not true. I hope he gets brought before the court and sent to jail. [follow-up: some on twitter have pointed out that Judge Jackson may have allowed for Stone to declare his innocence and that these comments may fall into that exception].
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Trump may have committed loan/bank fraud. As one example, he overvalued his assets in order to secure a loan from Deutsche Bank to buy the Buffalo Bills.
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Cohen admits that Donald Trump Jr. signed one of the hush money reimbursement checks. That implicates Junior in an additional felony.
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I would also add that both Cohen and the Dems have done an admirable job of describing and condemning the witness intimidation tactics of Trump and his crew (including Gaetz). We’ve accepted a lot of Trump’s harassing statements as normal. This hearing brought us back to a time when we would normally punish such behavior as anti-social and illegal. I think it’s going to be tougher for Trump to use these tactics after McCabe and now Cohen have provided a sustained critique. We have to keep political pressure on and force the DOJ to take investigations and prosecutions of these matters seriously.
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In addition, Cohen said he briefed Ivanka and Junior about TT Moscow at least 10 times. That contradicts Junior’s testimony and Ivanka’s prior public statements.
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Ro Khanna does an admirable job of getting Cohen to identify Junior as Executive 2 in the SDNY docs and for confirming that this was garden variety fraud involving 4 individuals (Trump, Junior, Weisselberg and Cohen) and only 1 of those 4 is going to jail. Weisselberg cooked up the scheme to pay the fees out over 12 months to make it look like a legal retainer agreement, which was approved by Trump. Cohen implies that the matter is continuing to be investigated by SDNY. Khanna brings clarity and urgency to this crime, which the GOP and media have downplayed. The check signed by Trump is a smoking gun. This is fraud. It’s not directly connected to Russia, but it’s a major crime nonetheless, part of which was committed in the Oval Office. Trump should be removed from office for this alone.
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Cohen admits to Jimmy Gomez that he asked the IRS for a copy of the audit that Trump often spoke of as the reason to avoid releasing his tax returns and got nothing back. There is/was no audit. Trump admitted to Cohen that he did not want to release his tax returns because he did not want to go under audit. Gomez does a nice job of setting the predicate for subpoenaing the tax returns as a basis to determine whether he is at risk from foreign influence and conflicts.
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AOC was very effective. On AMI, Cohen names David Pecker, Barry Levine and Dylan Howard as the people who would have the ‘vault’ of information on all the hush schemes that Pecker and Trump have run together to protect Trump. On asset inflation, Cohen admits that Trump inflated assets for insurance purposes and names Alan Weisselberg, Matthew Calamari, and Ron Lieberman. Cohen also points to the Trump org as the source for the financial statements/tax returns which would yield more information. Next, she goes to the issue of Trump’s golf courses (Trump Links, Bronx). Trump has engineered schemes of using publicly built golf courses where Trump keeps the money in a sweetheart deal and devalues assets to avoid paying taxes. Trump said that the golf club in Jupiter, FL was worth $50 milll but for local tax authorities he pitched the value at $5 million. In doing so he engineered deductions by demanding them from the tax authorities based on the artificial devaluation. AOC also ties it to the NYT expose on how Trump undervalued all of the assets transferred to him from his family in order to save money on taxes. He points to Alan Weisselberg and the tax returns for info sources. AOC has perhaps laid the strongest basis for subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns.
…and Weisselberg comes back into focus. He’s been Trump’s accountant for decades. He seems to have an aura of probity but I don’t see how that’s possible. The only dirtier job in the whole organisation would be groom of the privy stool. I don’t know how far his immunity goes but he’s a co-conspirator according to Cohen.
Dirty deeds indeed.
I do think this hearing was a game changer.
- Suborning of Perjury: Today’s hearing completely validated the Buzzfeed piece. It also deepened Trump’s liability exposure and that of his legal team. They actively coached and molded Cohen’s testimony to match Trump’s false statements. This is bigly, and it’s about the key transaction that made Trump a Russian asset. In addition, Cohen’s detailed and methodical explanation of how Trump suborns perjury through coded language and intonation places this within the mob/RICO sphere. This makes it much more likely that Trump can be indicted or named an un-indicted co-conspirator on this matter.
- Campaign finance violations - We got much more corroboration that Trump knew of the scheme, approved of it every step of the way, and that Donald Trump Jr. and Alan Weisselberg are deeply involved and should expect to be indicted. The Trump Org will not survive what the SDNY is about to do to it.
- Stone-Wikileaks-GRU: Cohen leveled a bombshell that adds to the Stone indictment and ties Trump himself to the Russian scheme to hack and steal DNC/Clinton campaign emails and release them for use. Stone had contemporaneous knowledge of the GRU-Wikileaks arrangement, informed Trump, and Trump manipulated that knowledge to leverage those emails for his campaign’s benefit. Cohen also said that the OSC has information to substantiate what he said about the Stone-Trump conversation(s) on this topic. This is the most Watergate like of the #trumprussia tracks.
- Real Estate/Insurance Fraud - This is a whole new area of inquiry which Cohen expounded on and the Democrats effectively seized upon to set up the basis to subpoena Trump’s tax returns.
Trump has never been exposed as he was today. These are garden variety felonies wrapped up in a larger conspiracy. Each individual crime is understandable, explainable and prosecutable. It’s go time, folks. Over the next 3 months, the big shoes drop.
“She handles all of the banking, and I didn’t want her coming to me and asking, ‘what’s the $130,000 for?’”
I think all of us who are of the male persuasion can agree this is a highly credible statement. 
It’s a lot worse than most of us can imagine. The truth is some know the details, we don’t. Trump knows them all.
Republicans are waging class war.
That’s why Trump can diss Americans at the same time he’s cuddling up to Kim. Same class. Well, Kim’s not quite the… you know…
Where’re the sheep?
Its hard to keep up, but isn’t there still scope for Trump to deny he knew the culprit of the DNC hack was Russian intelligence?
Not when he said, “Russia, if you’re listening” go hack and find the 30k missing HRC emails a week after he had a conversation with Roger Stone in which Stone told him Wikileaks had the emails and was going to release them and that he had knowledge that Russia hacked and stole the emails. We know this from 3 or 4 potential sources: 1. Papadopoulos report that the Russians had those emails (April 2016); 2. Trump’s references to emails after the Trump Tower meeting; 3. DCLeaks early releases in mid-June 2016 and news reports that the DNC had been hacked; 4. Stone; or 5. Press reports on the weekend of the Dem convention in which the Clinton team said that the most likely scenario was that they were hacked by the Russians. All of these events preceded the ‘Russia if you’re listening’ press conference. Afterwards, Stone continued to communicate with GRU/Wikileaks and learned more, which knowledge he passed on to Trump.
I don’t want to spread any rumors or anything, but I keep hearing this unsubstantiated report that there’s some Fat Ass who flew to some country in Asia to meet with a murderous dictator for some kind of dinner party or something. I guess it’s not too important, though, since all that anyone gives a shit about is the Cohen testimony. LOL!
It’s extraordinary how a little Blue Wave can brighten up ones day, isn’t it?
Related to that on three occasions today Cohen was asked variations on “who would know/corroborate this”, and he gave 2 or 3 names each time. I think Weiselberg was mentioned twice, Rhona Graff, Alan Calamari (really), and a couple others I didn’t catch. In other words, this committee will be subpoenaing a few more, who may not handle things as well as Cohen did.
I agree there’s plenty out there, I hope its enough to meet whatever burden of proof would be required.
I didn’t follow close, but it all felt like a big ol’ strawman to me. Here’s a SIGNED CHECK from Trump’s personal account! Of course Trump is allowed to donate as much of his own money as he likes and none of these checks state a purpose. Obviously Cohen received money from the Trump Org given he worked for them.
Never been to Prague.
Trump said he “had no business in Russia” which Eddie Haskell from Leave it to Beaver–much less a member of the bar–could spin as meaning there was no deal in Russia yet.
The Twitter responses from the Trump kids about him denying he wanted a WH job seemed almost scripted. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have documentation of him doing exactly that that they’ll trot out to discredit the parts of his testimony they want discredited.
It looked to me as a non-lawyer like a bunch of dramatic sounding stuff that ultimately means nothing. All the pundits will pick it apart and declare that, as dramatic as it all sounded, the only thing of interest he said was that there were SDNY investigations pending. Which seemed likely before his testimony but doesn’t seem any more or less likely now that he has said it.
Isn’t it just the sprinkles on the cupcake that this is taking his little tete-a-tete out of the news? hahaha
Calamari is fried.
Don’t be laughing too much… It’s right in his typical way of doing things to do something extremely dramatic tomorrow to wrangle the spotlight back on him…
I’d be very worried about some unilateral withdrawal of troops promise or similar capitulation.
He’s pissing himself in Hanoi over this. You can worry for both of us cause I’m not.
Oh, I agree with that.
…Still holding out hope that he takes this chance to defect… Hope the SS doesn’t stand in his way if he tries to run.