, 12 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
Let me say a little more about this one.
I transcribed Gerry Connolly's exchange with Michael Cohen about his meeting with Trump and Sekulow before he testified to HPSCI and SSCI. Cohen resists the label that Trump "coached" his testimony, but it's hard for me to see a different construction of what he describes.
Here's video of that exchange, kindly posted by @atrupar. Cohen clearly says Trump fed him lines in this meeting denying the Moscow deal and any Russian entanglements.
Cohen has admitted that his written submission to both committees was false and pled guilty to lying to congress. As part of the process, he made an allocution before the court describing the crime. Cohen said he was trying to conform to the President's public tweets and tv hits.
That's why, Cohen says, he foreshortened the timeline of the Moscow deal to avoid overlap with the Republican primaries. What Cohen doesn't say in the allocution, however, was that he'd had any direct meetings with the president about this. int.nyt.com/data/documenth…
If you had a meeting with the president and his new lawyer about this testimony, where you specifically went over the "message he wanted to reinforce," it seems shady to leave that out of your allocution and pass it off as a close reading of his "day-to-day political messaging."
And as we all know, later on, BuzzFeed wrote a story saying that the Special Counsel's Office had documents and corroborating testimony that Cohen had been ordered by Trump to lie to Congress. The SCO then came out and said that wasn't accurate; they didn't have that stuff.
Cohen has also denied being given an order. He even pushes back on the term "coached." But today he testified that he had a meeting with Trump and Sekulow "about [his] impending testimony" where they went over the message Trump wanted reinforced, and it was a false one.
Did the SCO know about this meeting? Does their BF statement rely on the distinction between an order and a wink and a nudge? Did they allow Cohen to not mention the meeting in his allocution in court? Or is this meeting new on them?
"I don’t have any further comment beyond the court record," Peter Carr says to these questions.
I think it’s pretty important that folks find ways to talk about this with a focus on the apparent disparity btw what Cohen said in Congress and what he said in court and how we explain that. Try not to get drawn into the BF story vortex.
Both the Nixon and Clinton articles of impeachment included allegations of approving of, counseling, or encouraging witnesses to provide false sworn testimony.
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