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| Tony Branco |
National Review "It’s over. Michael Cohen’s public testimony has ended, and amidst the hours of assertions, speculation, and contention, four allegations stand out from the others. First, Cohen testified that Roger Stone told Donald Trump about the WikiLeaks document dump in advance of the Democratic Convention. Second, Cohen testified that he suspected Trump knew in advance about Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer. Third, Cohen asserted that Trump directed Cohen to make porn-star-hush-money payments and later reimbursed him while Trump was president. And fourth, Cohen claimed that Trump gave him implied directions to lie to Congress and that Trump’s personal lawyer edited his false testimony.
"The first two claims grabbed headlines — taken together, they mark the first concrete, under-oath assertions that Trump was involved in any way with the various bumbling efforts of Trump-campaign officials and Trump allies to communicate with Russians or Russian assets. No, the claims are nothing like the collusion fever dreams of the hard-core conspiracy Left — and they don’t add up to anything criminal — but they would be improper and embarrassing nonetheless. Yet those first two claims are among Cohen’s least credible.
"The first two claims grabbed headlines — taken together, they mark the first concrete, under-oath assertions that Trump was involved in any way with the various bumbling efforts of Trump-campaign officials and Trump allies to communicate with Russians or Russian assets. No, the claims are nothing like the collusion fever dreams of the hard-core conspiracy Left — and they don’t add up to anything criminal — but they would be improper and embarrassing nonetheless. Yet those first two claims are among Cohen’s least credible.
"Let’s look at them in turn. The clearest expression of Cohen’s claims regarding Trump and Stone comes in his opening statement. Here’s Cohen:. . .
. . .
To conclude:
. . .
To conclude:
No single witness will decide this case, and the real losers in yesterday’s testimony were the Americans who thought that Cohen’s testimony would somehow represent the beginning of the end of one of the most divisive national controversies of modern times. The controversies will rage on, and we now turn our attention to the next big event — the long-awaited Mueller report, rumored to be released soon. I expect it to be far more instructive and dispositive (for good and ill) than anything we heard Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
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