Michael Cohen painted a very ugly portrait of President Trump in his testimony Wednesday — exactly as you’d expect from a guy whose hopes for the future rest entirely on doing exactly that. Yet he didn’t move the ball an inch when it came to any criminal charges or even on the “collusion” front.
Bizarrely, Buzzfeed is claiming the testimony confirms its long-debunked report that Cohen says Trump instructed him to lie to Congress about when negotiations ended for a Trump Tower in Moscow. That would be a crime — but Cohen plainly testified only that he “understood” that the president wanted him to lie.
What of his claim to have heard Roger Stone tell Trump that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange had informed him the site was about to release damning Democratic Party emails? Big deal: Even if Assange is lying when he denies ever talking to Stone, none of it is collusion with Russia — it’s just gossip.
Cohen also undermined the “Steele dossier” that launched the whole “collusion” investigation, by once again denying the dossier’s claim that he had “secret meetings with Kremlin officials in August 2016” in Prague. Indeed, Cohen confirmed that he’s never been to Prague.
Yes, as part of his plea deal, Cohen has embraced the legal theory that there’s a criminal campaign-finance violation in the way he and Trump paid Stormy Daniels to keep quiet. But that theory is completely untested in court — and the whole thing is far from what anyone but diehard Trump-haters would consider worth impeachment.
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05.21.2025