The saga of Michael Cohen’s House Oversight Committee testimony takes another sharp turn

| 11:00 pm EST January 28, 2019
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Last week Michael Cohen announced that he was no longer willing to show up and testify publicly before the House Oversight Committee, citing threats that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani had made against his family. Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings then insisted that Cohen would testify one way or the other, hinting that he would subpoena him if necessary. Now it turns out Cohen is indeed going to testify, but the format has been revised.

Even as all of this was playing out, Michael Cohen agreed to testify privately before the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. This led to a number of theories about potential hijinks behind the scenes, but Palmer Report explained that the committee’s Trump-Russia probe was still functioning in bipartisan fashion, and there was no reason to believe anything was happening in bad faith. Now we’re getting a resolution to Cohen’s House Oversight Committee testimony.

Michael Cohen and Elijah Cummings have reached an agreement where Cohen will indeed testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 8th as previously scheduled, but he’ll do it in private. Cohen’s reason for wanting this arrangement seems obvious enough. The Trump-friendly Republicans on the committee would have used the public hearings as an opportunity to hit Cohen with questions about the supposedly illegal behavior of Cohen’s father-in-law, which is precisely what Trump wants. By making the hearing private, it takes away Trump’s ability to twist the hearings.

What’s interesting here is that Elijah Cummings has agreed to let Michael Cohen testify in private. Cummings could have subpoenaed Cohen to testify in public, and Cohen would have had no choice but to go through with it. This means that Cummings – a hard nosed and politically savvy guy – has decided that Cohen’s public testimony is no longer necessary when it comes to taking Donald Trump down.