Now we must connect the dots
By
David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief
How many crimes did
Michael Cohen reveal in his testimony? By my count 14.
If you missed many of
the crimes, it’s not surprising. Fascinating as much of his testimony was,
Cohen did not articulate the various crimes in an orderly fashion. Instead, he
just threw a lot of them out there like so many dots.
And for good measure,
he said, in response to a question, that he was not confident that Trump would
peacefully transfer power to the next president, which would be a 15th crime
if his speculation proves accurate.
Worse, the House
Oversight and Reform Committee majority never connected Cohen’s dots into a
compelling picture of White House criminal culture—with three notable
exceptions that we will get to in a moment.
Scattered among
Cohen’s 20-page opening statement and its attached exhibits, together with his
hours of public testimony on Feb. 27, was plenty of evidence that Trump is
running a criminal organization whose offices and key staff simply moved its
headquarters from his Manhattan high rise to the White House.
Cohen revealed 11 kinds
of fraud: accounting, bank, charity, insurance, mail, wire, federal income tax,
state income tax, local property tax fraud, campaign finance disclosure and
federal ethics disclosure.
To those who have
followed our coverage of Trump, much of this is not news. But, to the vast
majority of Trump supporters, it would be, if the committee had asked questions
to give sense and context to Cohen’s revelations.
Cohen in detail or in
passing revealed 11 kinds of fraud: accounting, bank, charity, insurance, mail,
wire, federal income tax, state income tax, local property tax fraud, campaign
finance disclosure and federal ethics disclosure.
Many of these were
overlapping or interconnected. That’s how white-collar crime works. It’s not
akin to a crude stickup with a gun, it’s a slight-of-facts designed to fool the
gullible, enrich the bribable and to slip through the wide gaps in the weak
legal walls Congress has erected to address financial crimes.
Fraud is, everywhere
and always, a crime.
But for
sure they are proper subjects of criminal indictment, even if trial must be
delayed until Trump is out of office in 2021 or 2025. And, to be clear, we
think a sitting president can be indicted while in office—and should be if he
has committed serious felonies.
Cohen also accused
Trump of suborning perjury. Cohen indicated that others may have worked in
concert to mislead election and ethics officials, Congress and voters.
Then there are the
denials concerning a Trump Tower Moscow and hush money payments to porn actress
Stormy Daniels involved more people. That also raises the specter of
conspiracy, which can be a crime.
The Moscow real estate
negotiations continued well into the 2016 campaign. That matters because no large
project gets done in Russia without the blessing, explicit or tacit, of
Vladimir Putin, the modern czar who runs his country with a criminal gang
commonly called the oligarchs and a host of lesser crooks.
Lying about the tower
gave Putin leverage over Trump, kompromat far more powerful
than any supposed videotape of Trump watching hookers wet a hotel bed where the
Obamas once slept.
Trump’s previous
statements show that Cohen’s testimony about the Moscow real estate deal is
accurate. After all, Donald said, if he did not win the presidency, he had a
business to run and he was not going to let lucrative opportunities pass him
by.
Let that sink in for a
moment. In Trump’s mind, national security is secondary to profit, a view that
the Star Trek Ferengi would applaud.
According to Cohen, he
was instructed to lie to Congress by the person identified in his criminal case
as “Individual 1.” Cohen
said that person is Donald Trump.
And finally consider
the biggest and most disturbing crime of all: conspiring through intermediaries
with a hostile foreign power to win the presidential election.
Trump’s intermediary,
according to Cohen, was Roger Stone, who boasts of both being a hedonist and a
political dirty trickster. Putin’s intermediaries included WikiLeaks.
What we don’t know yet
is just how the 12 indicted Russian cyber-military officers were involved, but
Robert Mueller’s prosecutors charged with extraordinarily fine detail that they
were central to Kremlin interference with our 2016 elections.
During the Feb. 27,
hearing we heard a lot of efforts by Republicans to demonize Cohen, but not one
word about why Trump would have employed him as his consigliere for more than a
decade.
No Republican tried to
deny that Trump had done what Cohen said, other than vague assertions that
Cohen was lying.
The most illuminating
testimony came during the 10 minutes spit between three freshman Democratic
lawmakers: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Katie Hill of California
and also Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.
They asked pointed
questions that elicited useful information about where to pursue more facts.
Bravo.
If the Democrats are
serious, they will tell members in future hearings by the Oversight and other
House committees to stop preening for the cameras and useless recitations of
facts known and instead ask what the fictional William Forrester (Sean Connery)
called “soup questions” in the film Finding Forrester.
A soup question is
designed to elicit information that matters.
Ocasio-Cortez, Hill,
and Krishnamoorthi, none of them lawyers, asked concise questions
about what matters. They each conducted a better examination of Cohen than any
of the committee members who are attorneys.
Let’s hope the
veterans in Congress learn from the newcomers because nothing less than the
future of our liberty depends on it.
