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This thread seems wrong and obtuse to me. The controversy over the Buzzfeed story was not over whether Trump “directed” Cohen to lie directly or whether he did so less directly. It was over (a) whether he did so at all and (b) what precisely Cohen told the OSC about it.
The Washington Post reported that Mueller’s statement should be read as a total repudiation of the Buzzfeed story. That appears to be wrong.
washingtonpost.com/world/national…
washingtonpost.com/world/national…
At a minimum, Cohen is alleging that Buzzfeed got a very big thing right: that Trump behaved in a fashion that Cohen regarded as a direction to lie. That makes, at least on this point, the Buzzfeed story more consistent with the record than the Post’s after-action gloating.
Put another way, here is my challenge to readers: Read both the original Buzzfeed story and the Post’s after-action report. Which one feels truer today?
Cohen also goes significantly further than his prepared statement in his oral testimony. In this interaction with @GerryConnolly, he makes clear that he had a specific conversation with the president about his statement to Congress: c-span.org/video/?c478263…
My point is not that the @BuzzFeedNews story was flawless. I am certain that if @JasonLeopold and @a_cormier_ understood at the time that the "direction" of Cohen to lie had been inferred based on a combination of months of interaction and an elliptical converation with POTUS...
...they would have made that clear when they wrote the story. I'm not even saying the distinction is not a significant one. What I AM saying is that the distinction is subtle, and that the reality--at least as Cohen describes it--is far closer to what Buzzfeed reported...
originally than it is to what a lot of people assumed (and reported) at the time of the SCO statement.
