Michael Cohen is an unsympathetic character and a flawed messenger. Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer is, as Republicans hastened to point out at Wednesday’s much…
Michael Cohen is an unsympathetic character and a flawed messenger. Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer is, as Republicans hastened to point out at Wednesday’s much anticipated House oversight hearing, a prison-bound criminal who has pleaded guilty to a variety of crimes, including lying to Congress and filing fraudulent financial loan documents.
Nevertheless, his message, coming from someone who worked at Trump’s side for more than a decade, carried a sense of urgency that Americans discount at their peril: Cohen painted the president of the United States as a criminal who directed an elaborate scheme to deprive voters of important information before the 2016 election. He warned against letting Trump take a family business, with many shady dealings and a shady individual at its core, and reproduce it on a much larger scale.
“Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump,” Cohen noted at one point. “Every day most of us knew we were coming in and we were going to lie for him on something. And that’s exactly what’s happening now in this country.”
Michael Dean Cohen’s testimony — the most damning about a sitting president since White House counsel John Dean testified about President Richard Nixon in 1973 — had a bizarre, mirror-like quality to it.
