Trump former fixer Michael Cohen casts Trump as a ‘racist’ and ‘con man’ before Congress, says he knew in advance about WikiLeaks email dump: Google

By Glynn Wilson –

Mr. Donald J. Trump’s lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen may have laid down a corner stone of the legal fix that could bring down a president.

Testifying in Washington before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, Cohen established through documents and testimony a legal pattern of criminal conduct on the part of the president, behavior only fit for a mob boss, and he portrayed Trump and his brand as a marketing con game from way back by a rich and out of touch celebrity who never really expected to win the presidency.

Cohen testified that Trump did not run for president to win or to make the country great. He saw it as the “greatest infomercial in political history” for his name brand.

“He never expected to win the primary,” Cohen said. “He never expected to win the general election. The campaign, for him, was always a marketing opportunity.”

In a stunning opening statement reminiscent of John Dean’s testimony against President Richard Nixon during the televised Watergate scandal hearings, Cohen expressed deep shame for going along with Trump in his criminal business enterprises rife with tax evasion and bank fraud, and for his role in helping him win the presidency.

“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said. “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat”

Those three categories formed the outline of his statement. He proceeded in testimony to expose the dark side of Trump’s business dealings and political actions leading to his election.

Most significantly, Cohen testified that on multiple occasions Mr. Trump asked about the widely reported Moscow real estate deal, which even according to previous reporting we know was negotiated well into the campaign in the summer of 2016. This was past the time he previously testified on behalf of Trump that the deal was stopped in January, a story Trump has told on multiple occasions since. This is one of the lies he told Congress that added charges to the indictment against him, for lying to Congress, although Republicans on the committee still attacked his credibility.

All the while Trump was telling the public in speeches and on Twitter that he had no business dealings in Russia, even as numerous campaign officials have pleaded guilty to all manner of charges related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s still ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the election.

“He lied about it because he never expected to win the election,” Cohen said when asked about it. “He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Cohen testified to Congress under oath that the president lied to the American public about business dealings in Russia during the 2016 campaign, lied to reporters about knowing all about stolen Democratic Party emails, and lied about illegal hush money payments to cover up sexual affairs that could have damaged his election chances if the stories had come out before Election Day.

Cohen — who already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and was attacked by Republican members of the committee in the attempt to damage his credibility with the American people as a “proven liar” and a “convicted felon” who is going to prison for three years for his own part in the crimes — said the reason he lied before was on Trump’s indirect orders and to protect his boss, who demanded extreme loyalty. Democratic members of the committee accused Republicans of running from the truth and defending a corrupt president in full view of the American people.

In an attempt at personal and public redemption — after he admitted protecting Trump and his reputation from illegalities and bad press for 10 years, including negotiating “catch and kill” deals with tabloid newspapers and magazines to stop negative stories from being published about Trump — Cohen said he changed his mind about Trump after he took office and stoked racism in Charlottesville and elsewhere, attacked the press, and undermined American democracy itself with his statements and “despicable” actions.

“I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore,” he insisted, turning over checks and bank records that appear to prove the hush money payments, election fraud, and tax and bank fraud, as he helped Trump inflate the value of properties on loan applications and deflate the value on tax forms (see documents below).

Cohen also made it clear that Trump knew in advance about Wikileaks releasing 20,000 emails to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which U.S. intelligence agencies say were hacked by Russians connected to the government of former KGB chief and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump has praised repeatedly since his election, and the Russian Mob and Oligarchs who have been laundering money through Trump properties for many years.

“Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” Cohen testified, at times tearfully. He met Mr. Trump in New York as “a real estate giant” and “icon,” he said. “Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating.”

Cohen said he rationalized Mr. Trump’s dishonesty in business as “trivial.” But as president, he said, “I consider it significant and dangerous.”

Seeming to warn others still under Trump’s spell in his inner circle, as well as Trump’s remaining political followers and members of Congress, Cohen said, “The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

Cohen also made the case that Trump was a racist, saying Trump once said that there’s not a country in the world run by blacks that was not a “shithole country.” That was while Barack Obama was president of the United States.

Cohen’s gripping testimony at the hearing bumped Trump’s meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un down on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and news websites and television news broadcasts, a fact that clearly upset Trump, his family and his White House and 2020 campaign team — halfway around the world in Vietnam.

He, his family and advisers were quick to express their displeasure in statements and tweets about the timing of the hearing, claiming Democrats were undercutting the president during “sensitive nuclear diplomacy” that most experts fear will result in no concrete guarantees that North Korea will give up its nuclear ambitions and make Trump look like a fool before the world, again, undermining the long-term interests of the United States.

All over social media, the public was demanding that the Democrats now in control of the House bring articles of impeachment against Trump, which some political analysts said would only stoke Trump’s voting base. Others were calling for Trump’s indictment for clear crimes, although legal experts say no sitting president has ever been jailed.

Others are demanding that Trump simply resign for his crimes and unAmerican behavior, evan calling Trump a traitor who has given aid and comfort to Russia, an American adversary, which would constitute treason. But there is no indication among Republicans in Congress or his campaign or White House staff that there is anyone willing to play the role Al Haig played in convincing Nixon he had no choice but to resign.

The Republicans still hold a slim majority in the Senate, where any impeachment trial would take place, unlike the situation in Nixon’s day, when his crimes became so clear to the American people that Republicans refused to stand up for him out of honest outrage in some cases, or for fear of losing reelection.

Public opinion experts are watching to see if Cohen’s testimony and the coverage could drive down public support for the president to below 30 percent, a threshold that could begin to erode support for Trump even among Republicans in Washington and around the country.

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