Throughout Michael Cohen’s highly anticipated congressional testimony, Republicans warned that the disgraced former Trump lawyer couldn’t be trusted — and it seems that claim still rings true.
After Cohen testified for several hours on Wednesday, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) accused Cohen, who has been convicted of lying to Congress, of perjuring himself yet again on whether he sought a job in the White House and other questions.
Liar, liar
Cohen pleaded guilty last year of lying to Congress about a Trump real estate project in Moscow. Since then, the disgraced lawyer has tried to rehabilitate himself to the nation, promising that, though he lied in the past, he has seen the light and will tell nothing but the truth about his former boss, who he described as a liar and racist in public testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee Wednesday.
But according to some skeptical observers, Cohen’s testimony was laced with yet more lies under oath. Republicans didn’t let anyone watching forget just who was testifying, and after testimony wrapped up, Jordan let Cohen have it.
Jordan pointed to numerous instances of alleged perjury, including Cohen’s claim that he never defrauded a bank, which Jordan said was plainly contradicted by Cohen’s guilty plea to bank fraud. Jordan also slammed Cohen for not reporting foreign government entities that he had contracts with on a “Truth and Testimony” form before the hearing while previously stating that he had done business with Kazkhstan’s BTA Bank JSC and South Korea’s Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd., which have both said they contracted business with Cohen’s law firm.
Jordan also said that Cohen gave contradictory accounts of his work as a lawyer, noting that Cohen said he was “a good lawyer who understood the need to present his client with sound legal advice,” while also stating that he made hush payments to Stormy Daniels “without bothering to consider whether that was improper, much less whether it was the right thing to do.”
Cohen also claimed that somebody at the firm Red Finch created a fake “Women for Cohen” Twitter account for him, but Jordan responded that Red Finch confirmed he had asked the company to make the account.
In a Thursday letter to Attorney General William Barr asking to prosecute Cohen, Jordan and Meadows reiterated that Cohen made numerous “intentionally false statements designed to make himself look better on a national stage” which contradicted evidence unearthed by New York prosecutors as well as by “witnesses with firsthand knowledge of the subject matter.”
Perjury and “blind loyalty”
Critics of Jordan, Meadows, and other Republicans who have cast aspersions on Cohen claim that Republicans are attempting to discredit Cohen to protect his former boss from scrutiny. Cohen certainly didn’t mince words, characterizing Trump as a fundamentally dishonest, disloyal and selfish person who won over Cohen’s “blind loyalty,” to Cohen’s regret. But Cohen’s claim that he never wanted a job at the White House has been called into question by Republicans, Trump’s sons, and even CNN reporters.
According to Jordan, Cohen lied when he said that he wasn’t angling for a position at the White House, which Jordan said was contradicted by evidence from attorneys in the Southern District of New York, who are prosecuting Cohen. Cohen said he wouldn’t “call them liars, but that statement is inaccurate.”
Jordan accused Cohen of turning on Trump after getting jilted over a coveted job, but Cohen claimed that he never aspired to be more than Trump’s personal lawyer, saying, he got “exactly what [he] wanted.” However, in a CNN interview in 2016, which Cohen shared on Twitter, Cohen told Chris Cuomo, “I certainly hope so” when asked if he wanted a White House job and that he would “a hundred percent” take one.
My segment this morning on #CNN #NewDayCNN with Chris Cuomo:https://t.co/Gp2hVim5Qr
— Michael Cohen (@MichaelCohen212) November 10, 2016
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump mocked Cohen’s claim on Twitter, saying that it was no secret that Cohen was desperate to be Trump’s chief of staff, calling it the “biggest joke of the entire transition.”
“Michael was lobbying EVERYONE to be ‘Chief of Staff.’ It was the biggest joke in the campaign and around the office. Did he just perjure himself again?” Eric Trump tweeted. Brother Donald Jr. responded: “Nailed it. It really was the biggest joke of the entire transition. The beginning of his bitterness was when he realized that was never going to happen.”
Covering Cohen’s testimony, CNN reporters Dana Bash and Jake Tapper both said that his claim did not measure up with the network’s reporting.
“I think a lot of us here raised our eyebrows because we knew it to not be true,” Tapper said, before playing a clip of Cohen’s claim. “I think the issue there is that one sentence. ‘I did not want to go to the White House.’ All of our reporting suggests that’s not true.”
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