Investigators drop the hammer on Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen
This week’s strange saga of the Trump-Russia investigation and Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen has gotten even stranger. Days ago the Senate Intel Committee abruptly announced, without explanation, the indefinite postponement of Cohen’s long planned public testimony about the Trump-Russia scandal. Then on Tuesday, Cohen met privately with House Intel Committee – and that meeting went extraordinarily poorly.
It’s still entirely unclear why the Senate canceled on Michael Cohen. It had long been angling to get him to testify in public, as he was considered a key witness in the Trump-Russia scandal. Then something changed. If Cohen’s testimony had been canceled due to some kind of partisan divide, someone on the committee would have publicly said so. Instead this suggested that, for whatever reason, Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t want Cohen out there speaking publicly at this particular point in the investigation. But then things got even stranger.
Cohen went ahead and met privately with the House Intel Committee on the same day that he was supposed to have met publicly with the Senate Intel Committee. Here’s how CNN reporter Manu Raju characterized that private meeting: “Michael Cohen met privately with House Intel in what members tell us was a contentious affair; subpoena was issued.” (link). So now we know that Cohen was not in a mood to cooperate with anyone. It circles back to the question of why the Senate canceled on him. It leads to a likely explanation.
Realistically, there were two possibilities for why Robert Mueller would have wanted the Senate to keep Michael Cohen off the public stage this week. The first was that Cohen had cut a deal to flip on Trump – but that seems to be out the window, based on Cohen’s lack of cooperation today. The second was that Mueller is about to indict Cohen in order to force him to flip on Trump. That now appears to be the case.
