Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Now we know why this was delayed several times

The Hill: "Michael Cohen's pathetic 'Cry for Me, Argentina' performance."
Okay, so no Russian collusion. No trip to Prague. No direct instruction to lie. And no secret effort asking WikiLeaks to hack the Democratic National Committee.

Pretty good stuff … for the Trump defense team.
Just a lot of hearsay and begging for empathy.  Cohen's big "bombshell" was that Roger Stone gave Trump inside information on Wikileaks in July 2016.  This would be the same information that Julian Assange was tweeting and appearing on TV to tout in June 2016.  Big reveal.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's bombshellier is that multiple sources have already reported that Donald Trump's written responses to Robert Mueller include the assertion by Trump that he never had any conversation with Roger Stone about the Wikileaks hack.

Good thing it's just a process crime.

Anonymous said...

18 U.S. Code § 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371

Robert Fisk said...

The commi garrulously opines on the Cohen testimony (see above and below this comment), but will not be commenting on his former instruction for us to take a "small reflective pause upon seeing Buzzfeed so emphatically double, triple and quadruple down on their disputed reporting" that Trump had ordered Cohen to lie to Congress, and that they saw documents proving it.

I'm glad I didn't waste any time pausing.

Cohen: "Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress."

Anonymous said...

https://i.imgur.com/J6PI36z.gif

Anonymous said...

You can have no Prague meeting, and no explicit direct orders, and Cohen having no personal info about collusion or a piss tape.

We'll take:
Trump knowing about the Trump Tower treason meeting beforehand;
Trump knowing about the Wikileaks Russia hacks beforehand;
Trump pursuing the Putin tower deal into 2017 while lying about it;
the Deutsche Bank/insurance fraud (good questions, AOC!);
the signed payoff checks;
Trump's lawyers rewriting Cohen's perjury statement to Congress;
and the other, unrevealed illegal acts being investigated by the SDNY that Cohen declined to talk about.

That's a more than fair tradeoff.

Plus the fun embarrassing stuff like Trump threatening his old schools about releasing his old grades, that his campaign was only ever supposed to be an infomercial, and that he's not really under eternal IRS audit.

Perhaps the most fun part of the hearing-- have I mentioned that 2019 is going to be so fun?-- was the three dozen mentions of Alan Weisselberg. Weisselberg is the Trump CFO who handled the Trump money for 40+ years, literally running the company for 30, and who has flipped for Mueller. Yet he had a very, very, VERY quiet 2018.

Mmmmm.... nothingburger.

http://i.imgur.com/7URDsWt.jpg

Eric said...

These Trump "crimes" fall into three categories:
1) Things that aren't crimes.
2) Crimes not proven
3) Crimes that are definitely coming...just you wait!

Mmmm....nothingburgers.

Robert Fisk said...

And all served up by someone about to go to prison for lying to...why, lying to the very institution he was testifying in front of again. That's the Dem's idea of a star witness.

But.....Weisselberg will save us!

Robert Fisk said...

Quick quiz - who said the following in 2016?:

"I’ve lost count as to how many times the disgusting liberal mainstream media have attempted to label Mr. Donald Trump a racist, a xenophobe, and a bigot. And let’s not forget sexist, misogynist, narcissist, Islamophobe, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semite, demagogue, and countless others. It’s disgraceful."

Anonymous said...

Ah, Michael Cohen, the struggling conservative's living embodiment of two profiles looking at a vase. So devastatingly truthful and nothingburgery whenever he says something that sides with Trump. Such a lying sack of felonious bullshit when he doesn't. Sometimes in back-to-back sentences!


Quick quiz: Remember when Robert Mueller sent John Gotti to prison using the star witness testimony of Neil Armstrong and Mr. Rogers?


Why worry? As long as all the reporting is just more Fake News, and Trump didn't testify to Mueller in writing that he knew nothing of the the Trump Tower treason chat, and never spoke to Roger Stone about Wikileaks, the face of your party is sitting pretty.

Robert Fisk said...

With the two year dream of Trump collusion and suborning perjury charges in ruins at the feet of the incredulously-blinking commi, it's now, "Russian collusion - who cares about that? Trump didn't want his grades released! And of course he didn't collude, because he didn't even want to be president, stupid! And guess what? - he gets audited by the IRS! Impeachment, here we come!"

Anonymous said...

https://media3.giphy.com/media/cEUTDxSwjfnZC/giphy.gif

Robert Fisk said...

I don't know what's at the "you-owned-me" image link above, since I didn't follow it, but the image that remains in my mind is of the dazed, devastated commi crawling on his hands and knees trying to pick up whatever crumbs he can find on the congressional committee floor.

Anonymous said...

http://memecrunch.com/meme/5068B/no-one-believes-you/image.jpg

Anonymous said...

Washington Post: After Cohen’s hearing, the BuzzFeed bombshell that Mueller disputed looks better — and worse

If you believe [Michael Cohen], you might be inclined to think that BuzzFeed mostly got it right.

Cohen said both in writing and in spoken testimony that Trump told him — in informal code that they both understood — to lie. He said that Trump’s lawyers edited his statement to Congress to conform with that.

...Cohen corroborated the thrust of the report: that Trump made it clear that he wanted his fixer to lie about the Moscow Tower project, including in his statements to Congress. Cohen was to stick to the lie that Trump’s involvement ended in January of 2016 even though it went on for many months after that.

...The problem is that’s not how BuzzFeed expressed what happened. Its first paragraph read: “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.”

...On Wednesday afternoon, I talked by phone with Ben Smith, editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, who said he was satisfied that Cohen’s testimony “lines up very closely with what we reported he had told the special counsel.” ...He said he continues to think that the use of “directed” in the headline and the first paragraph was justified, and that the story holds up.

I continue to believe that the use of the word “explicitly” was an overstatement in the story — a bridge too far — because it was contradicted by Cohen in writing.

...Yes, the story’s overall scope holds up. And more details will emerge that may provide further corroboration — for example, about specific editing by White House lawyers of Cohen’s testimony to Congress and about what was said in a hazily described meeting involving Trump, lawyer Jay Sekulow and Cohen.

But I keep remembering the high praise I once heard about a well-respected investigative editor: “He always wants to dial back the story 10 percent.” In this overwrought moment where journalism is so crucial and so under attack, that sounds better than ever.

Robert FIsk said...

How do the crumbs taste, commi?

Anonymous said...

Crumb's? Taste? You tell me, Sis. Open wide.

https://comixjoint.com/6_site_graphics/*Covers/2_Underground/zap4-art1detail.jpg