Michael Cohen's testimony placed President Donald Trump even closer to the Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, according to a former federal prosecutor.
The president insisted after the daylong congressional hearing that his former attorney had not implicated him in the so-called "Russian hoax," but former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade wrote for The Daily Beast that Cohen had indeed bolstered the criminal case against Trump and his inner circle.
Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee that he overheard Trump speaking to longtime friend Roger Stone on speakerphone, and the GOP operative said he had spoken to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange about an upcoming “massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
This call, according to Cohen, came just days ahead of the Democratic National Convention, and if he's correct, that means Trump would have known the hacks had been carried out by Russia, as had been widely reported the previous month.
Trump told Stone, according to Cohen's testimony, "wouldn't that be great" if those Russian-hacked emails were dumped online, and McQuade says that places the president very close to a conspiracy already charged by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller has already charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with conspiring to defraud the U.S. by interfering in the presidential election by hacking the DNC and staging the release of the stolen emails.
"If Mueller can establish that Stone, Trump or others participated in the same conspiracy," McQuade said, "such as by suggesting the timing of the release, then they could be properly charged as co-conspirators with the Russian intelligence officers."
McQuade, the former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said conspiracy requires only the knowledge that a crime is committed, an agreement that some member of the group will break the law and then the commission of at least one overt act to carry out that agreement.
"The agreement may be explicit or implicit," she wrote. "Even encouragement can be an overt act. The call that Cohen says he heard between Trump and Stone alone does not establish that Stone and Trump participated in a conspiracy with the Russian hackers, but it is a piece of evidence, combined with other evidence, that could help establish sufficient evidence of a crime."
Cohen told lawmakers the president was also aware of Donald Trump Jr.'s efforts to obtain "dirt" on Hillary Clinton offered by a Russian lawyer, and the former attorney also implicated Trump's son in his own plot to violate campaign finance law with the Stormy Daniels payoff.
Then, Cohen testified that Trump's personal lawyers “reviewed and edited” his false 2017 congressional testimony, where he lied about his efforts to negotiate a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, which he said the president knew about.
"Cohen’s testimony alone will not be enough to charge or impeach Trump," McQuade said. "But liars can be corroborated. Mueller would want to find other evidence to confirm Cohen’s testimony, such as phone records, bank records, intelligence intercepts or the testimony of others. All of these pieces of evidence mean little when viewed alone, but when considered together, they may add up to a case against the president."
