Cohen’s testimony breaches Trump’s wall of protection

Only President Donald Trump could use his encounter with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to reinforce some of the worst things his former lawyer Michael Cohen said about him in congressional testimony Wednesday.

Nothing Trump does should surprise us anymore, yet it was still shocking that the man who holds an office once associated with the words “leader of the free world” would refer to a murderous dictator as “my friend.” It’s clear Trump feels closest to autocrats and is uneasy with truly democratic leaders.

The president’s apparatchiks also gave us a hint as to what an unrestrained Trump might do to the free press. They excluded White House reporters Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press and Jeff Mason of Reuters from the press pool covering the dinner between Trump and Kim for daring to ask inconvenient questions of our country’s leader. This wasn’t the work of Kim or Vietnam’s authoritarian government. It was the imperious action of a man who wishes he could live without the accountability that free government imposes.

It was an appropriate prelude to the attempt of Republicans on the House Oversight Committee — from the moment the committee’s chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., gaveled Wednesday’s hearing to order — to use procedural maneuvers to block Cohen’s testimony. The Democratic majority swept the GOP motion aside, signaling the end to an unaccountable presidency.

The GOP Congress’ obsequiousness toward Trump has been costly to the country. And it’s no wonder that Trump’s apologists sought to keep Cohen from speaking to a national audience.

His testimony was damaging to Trump personally — “He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.” — and legally, since it opened new avenues of inquiry.

Cohen alleged Trump was informed by his longtime friend Roger Stone of a WikiLeaks dump of emails that could harm Hillary Clinton.

Cohen also testified that Trump, as president, continued to reimburse him for the costs of hush money payments to two women alleging affairs with Trump. This moves the issue of whether Trump broke campaign finance laws into the White House itself.

And Cohen said that Trump “knew of and directed” negotiations over building a Trump Tower in Moscow throughout the campaign, further enmeshing the president with Russian interests — and with efforts to mislead voters in 2016 about his Russian ties.

These and other Cohen claims and revelations underscore how much time has been lost because Republicans ignored their obligation to get to the bottom of the many allegations enveloping Trump.

Their past evasions are of a piece with the convoluted intellectual somersaults they are now performing to protect him. Having successfully prevented Congress from acting forcefully, the Trump camp is now saying that if Mueller does not find utterly devastating smoking-gun evidence of collusion, Democrats who control the House should shelve all further inquiries and move on.

What’s forgotten is the profound difference between the Trump case and the Watergate experience. Congressional hearings into Richard Nixon’s behavior were held simultaneously with a special prosecutor’s investigations. Congress, not the special prosecutor, forced Nixon to resign.

Their fear that this might happen again is why House Republicans worked so hard to delegitimize Wednesday’s hearings.