“He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.”
Thus spoke President Donald Trump’s former consigliere Michael Cohen during Wednesday’s highly anticipated hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. Given Cohen’s blemished background, many supporters of President Trump quickly rejoined: Is Cohen talking about the president or himself?
Fair point. Cohen is a convicted liar. Count us among those who have seen his road-to-Damascus conversion when it comes to his former boss as, well, convenient. He spent a decade doing Trump’s dirty work and now he says he’s ready to speak with the sound of angels.
Soon, he’ll be singing that tune from prison, where he belongs.
But the president and his loyalists in and out of Congress are making a big mistake when they rush to name all the reasons Cohen can’t be trusted when it comes to Trump. They seemingly forget that nearly all that Cohen did — including lying previously to Congress — was done in service to Trump himself.
If a man may be known by the company he keeps, what about the lawyers and fixers he hires? Not since Watergate has a president surrounded himself with so many discredited felons and frauds.
Cohen told the committee that Trump was mesmerizing at times, and he had gone to work for him because he wanted to, not because he needed to. And that he had stayed even as his job required him to lie to first lady Melania Trump about her husband’s affair, and even when Trump spewed racist comments, such as saying black people wouldn’t vote for him because they were “too stupid.”
“And now, I’ve lost it all,” Cohen told the committee.
How did that happen? By degrees, he said in comments that read more like a warning than a confession.
“But in the mix, lying for Mr. Trump was normalized,” Cohen recalled. “And no one around him questioned it. In fairness, no one around him today questions it, either.”
Will Republicans in Congress hear the warning in those words? Will they see in Cohen a latter-day Cassandra, come back to warn of impending moral and political peril?
One can hope. After all, Cohen did more in his testimony than repeat what so many others have said about Trump. He brought evidence and details to buttress widely held assumptions.
Cohen presented a check signed by President Trump in 2017 that Cohen says was one of many installments paid to reimburse him for hush money he paid to keep the Trump’s affair with pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels secret.
Cohen also told Congress that he was in the room when Roger Stone, another former Trump aide who has been indicted, called to tell Trump of his conversations with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. Put on speaker, Stone told Trump to expect something big to drop, Cohen testified.
Soon after, WikiLeaks dropped thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee. All were used to damage the Clinton campaign and all, we later learned, were initially hacked by Russians who were working overtime to help Trump win.
Importantly, though, Cohen testified he never saw direct evidence of Trump colluding with Russia.
He suspects Trump knew in advance about the campaign’s meeting with Russia intermediaries in Trump Tower, but has no physical proof or firsthand knowledge.
He also said that Trump never explicitly told him to lie to Congress about efforts to win Kremlin approval for a Trump hotel in Moscow.
“That’s not how he operates,” Cohen told the committee. “In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.”
Cohen said Trump frequently asked him about those negotiations in 2016 before and after he cinched the GOP nomination for president.
“Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,” he said. “He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.”
Cohen’s testimony continues Thursday, though behind closed doors. House committees are ramping up their own investigations. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the attorney general is expected before long.
Other prosecutors, especially federal and state officials in New York, continue to turn over the stones that paved Trump’s path to the White House and built his wealth.
We can’t yet know whether future testimony and new proof will support Cohen’s portrait of our president as a man with an insatiable habit of self-aggrandizement and brazen self-interest.
But who among us, at this late date, would be surprised if they do?