Senator: Cohen has used up any goodwill
Panel chairman blasts Trump’s former fixer after photo surfaces
WASHINGTON — The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has had it with President Donald Trump’s lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen after a photo surfaced of him enjoying a dinner out — just before he canceled a planned interview with the panel, citing medical issues.
“Any goodwill that might have existed in the committee with Michael Cohen is now gone,” Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said, reacting to a picture that Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley posted to her Twitter account, showing that on Sunday, Cohen was having dinner with friends at L’Avenue restaurant — and was offering hugs.
Cohen pleaded guilty last year to lying to Congress and is expected to report to prison on March 6 to begin serving a threeyear sentence. That has added some urgency to lawmakers’ efforts to reschedule Cohen’s testimony, after he has either canceled or postponed three planned interviews.
Burr and House Oversight chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., have suggested that they will pursue sessions with Cohen even if he is in prison. But as the panels plan for Mueller to release his eventual report, the Senate Intelligence panel also is beginning to think about writing its conclusions from its own two-year investigation.
According to Burr, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation has so far unearthed “no factual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
But in the House, Democrats are taking steps to ramp up their investigations of the president and his allies.
A newly released transcript of House Intelligence Committee proceedings last week showed that, in addition to the transcripts of interviews the full House Intelligence Committee conducted as part of its GOP-led Russia investigation, its members also voted to send Mueller transcripts from interviews Democrats conducted with Simona Mangiante, the wife of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, and tech firm Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wiley.
Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee leaders announced the hire of two high-profile lawyers to serve as consultants: Norm Eisen, co-founder of government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Barry Berke, a partner at the New York law firm Kramer Levin who is a well-known expert in corruption and criminal law.
The additions signal that the committee plans to devote considerable attention to questions of ethics, corruption and possible obstruction of justice. Berke’s established profile in New York legal circles also could be a valuable resource as congressional investigators scrutinize questionable transactions in Trump’s corporate world, such as the president’s pursuit of a Trump Tower project in Moscow.
Although neither consultancy is a full-time position, a panel aide stressed that Eisen and Berke were carefully vetted for potential ethical issues and have agreed to pull back from their day jobs to be closely associated with the judiciary panel.
But the panel’s top Republican complained that the hires were biased, as Eisen and Berke had previously “teamed up to pen sharply partisan op-eds aimed at this committee’s oversight duties.”
“Looks like Democrats are staffing up for impeachment before Mueller’s report is even out,” ranking member Rep. Douglas Collins, R-Ga., said. “Is this the gig Berke and Eisen were auditioning for when they predicted last December the president was unlikely to have ‘a calm 2019’?”