Cohen plea hints Russia squeezing Trump, lawmakers say
Last week’s admission by Michael Cohen that he lied to Congress about a Trump Organization real estate project in Moscow suggests the Russian government may have damaging information about President Donald Trump, a top Democrat said Sunday.
Also Sunday, an attorney for former FBI Director James Comey said Comey has reached a deal to testify privately to the House Judiciary Committee, backing off his legal fight for an open hearing.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press that Thursday’s guilty plea by Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, raises the question of whether Russia continues to have leverage over Trump.
“Does the Kremlin have a hold on him over other things?” Nadler said. “There certainly was leverage during the campaign period and until recently because they knew he was lying, they knew he had major business dealings or that Cohen on his behalf had major business dealings.”
Nadler also said lawmakers “must do whatever we can” to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation from interference by Trump.
“We have a president who lies incessantly to the American people about big matters
and small matters. … The time when he can get away with lying to the American people all the time and evading accountability is coming to an end,” Nadler said.
Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., also defended the Mueller probe on Fox News Sunday. Trump has repeatedly decried the investigation as a “witch hunt.”
“I think that America, which stands for the rule of law, the leading democratic country in the world, our president needs to respect the independence of this investigation,” Cardin said.
Cohen last week pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate project that Trump and his company pursued at the same time that he was securing the GOP nomination in 2016. Cohen told prosecutors that he had lied to distance Trump from the project during the hotly contested presidential race.
Democrats also said allegations that Trump sought business in Russia longer into the 2016 presidential campaign than he previously suggested raises the possibility that the Russians have compromised his ability to work in the national interest.
The relationship between Trump and Russia outlined in the guilty plea by Cohen,
“is so deeply compromising,” said Rep.
Adam Schiff, who is expected next year to take over the House Intelligence Committee.
“That puts our country at risk,” Schiff said on ABC’s
This Week. He said the new
details that have emerged beyond previously known ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia suggest such compromise is “far broader than we thought.”
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Sunday that “most Republicans who were about to nominate Donald Trump in the summer of ’16 would probably have thought it was a relevant fact” that Trump was still trying to do business with Russia at the time.
He added, in the wake of Cohen’s guilty plea, it has become clear that “most of these characters who are around Donald Trump, none of them have exactly a sterling record of telling the truth.”
“What I find particularly interesting with the revelation of Cohen’s plea is that he’s saying he lied to protect then-candidate Trump’s stories that he had nothing to do with Russia,” Warner said on CNN’s State of the Union. “So, the president seemed to already be changing his story a little bit and say, ‘Well, it was all legal.’”
Some Republicans contended Sunday that it was of little consequence that Trump was doing business in Russia during the campaign.
“The president is an international businessman; I’m not surprised he was doing international business,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said on Meet the Press. “Cohen is in trouble for lying to Congress. We have a Mueller investigation going on. We need to come to completion on that.”
Asked whether it was fair that voters had not been given a complete picture of Trump’s involvement with Russia in 2016, Barrasso said many
factors were involved in the campaign, not just Trump’s business dealings.
“There were so many things involved in the 2016 campaign, it’s hard to point to what one thing influenced voters,” the senator said. “They didn’t want Hillary Clinton; they wanted a new opportunity.”
Schiff also said Sunday that the testimony of former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone should be provided to Mueller “for consideration of whether perjury charges are warranted.”
Schiff said on This Week that emails between Stone and an associate, Jerome Corsi, are “inconsistent” with the testimony that Stone gave to the committee last year.
Schiff suggested that others may also potentially be in legal jeopardy for providing false testimony to the congressional committee. There’s generally a high legal threshold to prove such a charge, but he said “there are some people that I’m confident have met and exceeded that bar.”
Mueller’s investigators are trying to determine whether Corsi and Stone had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked material damaging to Hillary Clinton’s presidential effort. U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia was the source of that hacked material.
COMEY’S DEAL
Comey will appear voluntarily Friday before the House Judiciary Committee, which has agreed to withdraw a subpoena, Comey’s attorney said Sunday.
In a three-paragraph joint court filing Sunday, Comey’s lawyers also withdrew his request to a federal judge to quash the subpoena to testify before the House judiciary and oversight committees, writing, “Mr. Comey appreciates the Court’s attention to the above-captioned matter, but has now reached an acceptable accommodation with U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary for voluntary testimony.”
Lawyers for the U.S. House of Representatives consented to Comey’s move to drop the case.
Comey, whose lawyers went to court to challenge a congressional subpoena, said in a tweet that it was “hard to protect my rights without being in contempt.”
As part of a deal with legislators, Comey has been told that he is free to speak about the questioning afterward and that a transcript would be released 24 hours after he testifies, his attorney, David Kelley, said.
Comey is expected to be questioned about decisions made by the FBI in 2016, including a call not to recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server and the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign. Trump fired Comey in May 2017.
Comey will be “free to make any or all of that transcript public as he is free to share with the public any of the questions asked and testimony given during the interview,” Kelley said.
The Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, decried Comey’s use of “baseless litigation” and called it an “attempt to run out the clock on this Congress,” a reference to the few weeks left before Democrats take control.
A transcript of the interview will be released “as soon as possible after the interview, in the name of our combined desire for transparency,” Goodlatte said.
Information for this article was contributed by Felicia Sonmez, Paige Winfield Cunningham and Spencer S. Hsu of The Washington Post; by Ben Brody of Bloomberg News; and by Eric Tucker and Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press.