President Trump
Mainstream morning news is all abuzz this morning about a Buzzfeed article charging President Trump with
having directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his Moscow tower project.
Michael Cohen, in testimony to the Office of the Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, had
previously stated that the Trump Tower Moscow project had ended in January, 2016 as an attempt
to distance Trump from, and to limit, the FBI's Russia investigations.
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.
Buzzfeed is careful to note that this "is the first known example of Trump explicitly
telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia."
Predictably, the Buzzfeed article sent Democrats into an uproar, with some
calling for an investigation, others grabbing their pitchforks and torches and calling
for impeachment. 1 Others took to twitter:
2
In a surprising move, the Justice Department this afternoon actually issued a statement
on the Buzzfeed story, saying that there were unspecified inaccuracies in their
report.3
UPDATE:
Subsequent Washington Post reporting claimed that the Special Counsel's office
later sent Buzzfeed an excerpt from the transcript of Cohen's plea hearing, which showed that
Cohen said that he made the misstatements to be consistent with [Trump's] political messaging
and out of loyalty to [Trump] — it did not say that Trump told him to make those misstatements.
HOWEVER (emphasis mine):
Guy Petrillo, Cohen's attorney, wrote in a memo in advance of [Cohen's] sentencing, "We
address the campaign finance and false statements allegations together because both arose
from Michael's fierce loyalty to Client-1. In each case, the conduct was intended to
benefit Client-1, in accordance with Client-1's directives." Client-1 refers to Trump.
4
The Washington Post article goes on to say that nowhere else in the memo could
one find any direct statement that Trump had ordered Cohen to lie. Furthermore, the Justice
Department did some homework based on the Buzzfeed article and was unable to find
any testimony or other evidence to corroborate the report; this, WaPo explains, is
partly why the Office of the Special Counsel decided to dispute the report.