Trump Ordered Michael Cohen to Perjure Himself. It's Even Worse Than It Sounds.

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Trump Ordered Michael Cohen to Perjure Himself. It’s Even Worse Than It Sounds.
By Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait


At first glance, the revelation by BuzzFeed News reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier that President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his attempt to build a tower in Moscow during the campaign, looks bad for Trump. On second, third, and fourth glances, it looks extremely bad.

1. Attorney General William Barr has already defined this behavior as obstruction of justice. In the secret memo Barr wrote to the Department of Justice questioning Robert Mueller’s obstruction inquiry, Barr allowed that of course it was possible the president could obstruct justice if he did something incredibly obvious, such as instruct people to lie in sworn testimony:



At his Senate confirmation hearings, Barr reiterated that suborning perjury would obviously constitute obstruction.

Link to tweet

So whatever legal shield Trump believes he is getting in Barr will not help him escape this allegation.

2. The allegations are serious enough that even conservatives concede they would constitute a crime. The immediate response by Trump defenders Byron York and Mollie Hemingway has been to call the allegations “big if true,” while implying they are likely false. Erick Erickson has a short piece arguing the allegations would mean impeachment if they are true, before going on to speculate they are probably false, because no other news organization has yet confirmed them. (To be clear, in the news business, it is common enough for a news organization to break an exclusive story that we have a word for such an occasion: “scoop.”)

They can always move from denial to justifying the crime later. But the lack of any justification for the alleged crime at the outset is telling.

3. The evidence reportedly has multiple sources. Trump lawyer-of-sorts Rudy Giuliani dismissed the story: “Haven’t checked it out but if you believe Cohen I can get you a good all-cash deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.” Any denial of a crime by one’s client that is prefaced with “haven’t checked” obviously does not inspire confidence. And Giuliani’s assumption that the allegation rests on taking Cohen’s word for it is flatly contradicted by the report.

As BuzzFeed explains, the evidence did not originate from Cohen. Cohen merely confirmed what Mueller discovered through other sources: “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.”

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