[D]uring a contentious House Oversight Committee hearing Wednesday, Vermont Rep. Peter Welch pressed Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer about whether Trump had advanced knowledge of the release of stolen emails that were damaging to opponent Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Michael Cohen, who is scheduled to begin serving a prison term on federal charges in May, was questioned by lawmakers during a heated all-day session in which each member was given five minutes to probe the actions of the disbarred attorney.
Welch will also be questioning Cohen again on Thursday, this time behind closed doors in the House Intelligence Committee. The former personal lawyer for the president’s family has already pleaded to misleading Congress.
Welch used his time to ask Cohen about an event in July 2016, when longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone allegedly received a phone call from Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks, telling him there would soon be a dump of emails that would hurt Clinton’s campaign. Stone then told Trump, according to Cohen.
Trump has said he did not have prior knowledge of the Wikileaks emails and that Stone never told him about discussions with Assange.
“During a news conference on July 27, 2016, then-candidate Trump publicly appealed to Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public,” Welch said. “Do you recall if Mr. Trump had knowledge of the Wikileaks dump at the time of his direct appeal to Russia?”
Cohen responded that Trump was aware of the impending publication of Clinton’s emails.
Wikileaks released a statement while Cohen was still being questioned, saying Assange has “never had a telephone call with Roger Stone” and that the group publicly announced it would be publishing Hillary Clinton’s emails in March 2016.
STATEMENT on Michael Cohen testimony to Congress: WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has never had a telephone call with Roger Stone. WikiLeaks publicly teased its pending publications on Hillary Clinton and published > 30k of her emails on 16 March 2016. https://t.co/XcH75u3kbu
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 27, 2019
Cohen’s second of three days testifying on Capitol Hill occurs as special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is wrapping up a report on its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In his opening statement, Cohen said he did not believe Trump colluded with the Russian government nor did the president “directly” tell him to lie to Congress. However, Cohen said the president violated campaign finance law and was aware of his business negotiations in Russia during the presidential campaign.
Cohen provided the committee with a copy of a $35,000 check that Trump had signed from his personal bank account on Aug. 1, 2017, to reimburse Cohen “for the illegal hush money I paid on his behalf.” The money was allegedly used to pay adult film Stormy Daniels to maintain her silence about an affair with Trump.
Cohen said this check was one of 11 payment installments made throughout 2017.
“The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws,” Cohen said.
On Russia, Cohen said there were at least a half-dozen times between the Iowa Caucus in January 2016 and the end of June when the president asked him about referring to the Moscow Tower project.
“In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing,” Cohen said. “In his way, he was telling me to lie.”
Cohen outlined how Trump never truly expected to win the election, and used this as an excuse for his tenuous relationship with the truth while he was on the campaign trail.
“Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,” Cohen said. “He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.”
Republican committee members tried to delay the hearing with an array of procedural votes and motions, but committee chair Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., pushed on with the hearing.
Ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and other Republican committee members used their questioning time to attack Cohen’s veracity and labeled the hearing nothing more than a partisan attempt to smear the president.
Republicans accused Cohen of only testifying to get his sentence reduced and that it is the first time in history someone convicted of lying to Congress has been called back to testify. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., repeatedly questioned Cohen about the lawyer’s history of obscuring the truth and accused him of continuing this behavior during during the hearing.
Ahead of Cohen’s testimony, the White House called the former lawyer a “disgraced felon.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said “it’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word,” according to the New York Times.
Cohen’s return to Congress comes just under two years after he made his first appearance before intelligence committees as part of the investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen was found to have lied to Congress about how long discussions about the Trump Tower Moscow project extended into the 2016 campaign. He is to enter federal prison on May 6 to begin a three-year sentence for the crime.
There had been initial discussion about limiting the scope of Wednesday’s hearing to avoid questions about connections between Trump and the Russian government. However, Cummings said that because Cohen discusses Russia in his testimony, that he would not restrict the topic of questions.
