Cohen Revelation Brings Trump Closer To Impeachment

(The graphic image above was found on Facebook. The caricature of Michael Cohn is by DonkeyHotey.)

There has been a lot of talk about impeaching Donald Trump since soon after he was sworn in, but I have been doubting whether enough proof can be found to convince enough Republican senators to agree (two-thirds of the Senate is required to remove a president from office). That's why I have been anxiously awaiting the results of Robert Mueller's investigation.

But the new accusation by Michael Cohen has changed the game. He has said that Donald Trump directed him to lie to Congress about Trump's efforts to build a hotel in Russia (which went on far longer than Trump has said it did).

That means Trump suborned perjury and committed obstruction of justice with that direction to Cohen. These are crimes, and were among the charges against Nixon that forced him out of office.

Fox News (and some other Trump defenders) have just accused Cohen as being a liar. That is true. He has pled guilty to lying. But what they fail to report is that Cohen was forced to admit he lied because there is evidence (both of the lie and Trump's directing him to lie).

For the first time, I believe Trump's impeachment (and removal from office) is a real possibility. If Mueller has evidence that Trump committed a crime (and it now looks like he does), then Republicans will not be able to justify protecting him any longer.

Here is just a part of the article at BuzzFeed News revealing this latest news:

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.

The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.

This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

But Cohen's testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.