After Thursday's blockbuster BuzzFeed News report about President Donald Trump ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress stunned politicos, one conservative commentator thinks the whole thing is a farce — but his reasoning is utterly absurd.
John Cardillo, an anchor for the right-wing news station Newsmax, made his case on Twitter Friday afternoon.
"I can't believe people are buying this BuzzFeed story," wrote Cardillo. "You'd have to believe that Trump would reach out to Cohen, after Cohen publicly admitted that he was cooperating with Mueller, and ask Cohen to lie to Congress. It's a moronic premise w/out any corroborating evidence."
Cohen was not the source of the story. Anyone who actually read the report or followed the Trump-Cohen saga would know this.
"Cohen testified in Fall 2017," The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand correctly noted. "His offices weren’t raided until April 2018 and he didn’t begin cooperating with Mueller until months after that. So your assertion makes no sense."
Cardillo's twisting of the facts was shown no mercy.
Cardillo is spectacularly wrong.
To recap:
BuzzFeed News reported on Thursday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’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.”
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to a slew of crimes including lying to Congress and was sentenced to three years in prison.
His testimony has become an invaluable cog in Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia and if the president obstructed justice.
Although there is debate over whether Trump obstructed justice when he fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017 over “this Russia thing,” the testimony Cohen gave as part of his plea agreement “is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia,” BuzzFeed learned. Trump “had at least 10 face-to-face meetings with Cohen about the deal during the campaign.”
BuzzFeed’s report, if true, offers the strongest available evidence to date that Trump was directing his underlings to obstruct an ongoing federal investigation.
Cohen’s legal advisor Lanny Davis said Thursday that Cohen does not intend to let Trump“bully” him into not testifying.
Davis' comments were in response to a series of Trump’s tweets about Cohen’s father-in-law, which may amount to witness tampering, are a clear ploy to intimidate Cohen into not testifying before the House on February 7.
This, too, escaped Cardillo.
It was not lost on anyone else though.
Sometimes we simply have to laugh because none of this is normal.
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