Hysteria about obstruction of justice ensued. “By referencing threats, Cohen can let people run wild with speculation of witness tampering without ever having to actually accuse anyone of tampering,” said Ronn Blitzer, legal analyst at Law & Crime. Twitter obliged.
“The worst thing that could happen for [Cohen] or Mueller would be to get trapped and make the mistake of lying,” said Blitzer. “Not only would it expose Cohen to additional charges, it would compromise Mueller’s investigation by casting significant doubt on the credibility of a key witness.”
Cohen then postponed his appearance before the House Intelligence Committee. Chairman Adam Schiff gave him a pass, attributing the postponement to “the interests of the investigation.”111 Then Cohen delayed an appearance before the SSCI, claiming “post-surgery medical needs.” But photographs of Cohen dining out on the town with five buddies appeared on social media, infuriating Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), who said, “I can assure you that any good will that might have existed in the committee with Michael Cohen is now gone.”112
The big showdown arrived in the last week of February. On February 26, Cohen met behind closed doors with members of the SSCI and apologized to them for lying to them in 2017. Senators grilled him over his previous prevarications. During the hearings eighteen months earlier, Cohen had defended Trump. Staffers reported that he now took the opportunity to eviscerate his former client. After more than eight hours of questioning, he told the press, “I look forward to tomorrow to be able to, in my voice, tell the American people my story. I am going to let the American people decide exactly who is telling the truth.”113
Cohen was playing for time. On February 20, 2019, a federal judge had approved delaying the start of his three-year prison sentence until May 6, due to physical therapy and his need to prepare to testify regarding Trump’s business practices, campaign, charitable foundation, and payments made to “influence” the election. Questions about Mueller’s investigation were off limits.114
As Davis and Cohen intended, Cohen’s three days of testimony coincided with Trump’s second historic meeting in Vietnam with North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to prevent war on the Korean Peninsula. The strategy suited the New York Times, which ran fifteen stories on Cohen’s testimony, including three op-eds. There was nothing on the front page about Trump’s summit with the North Korean leader; three stories on that subject were buried on pages 8 and 9.
On February 27, 2019, Cohen took an oath to tell the truth before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. He began with a written statement that included this gem: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. 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. In his way, he was telling me to lie.”115 Huh? Cohen was channeling Johnny Carson’s psychic character, “Carnac the Magnificent,” who could divine unknown answers to unseen questions.
The disgraced lawyer, now disbarred, accused Trump of having committed a number of criminal infractions during the campaign. But Cohen did not deliver a scintillating takedown of the president as promised, nor did he provide evidence of collusion. “I have no direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. I have my suspicions,” he said. He did annihilate the key element of the Steele “dossier” that wouldn’t die. “I’ve never been to Prague,” he said in answer to a question. “I’ve never been to the Czech Republic.”116
For more than five hours, attorney Cohen blamed his former client for his woes, calling Trump a “racist,” a “conman,” and a “cheat.”117 Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) accused him of turning on Trump out of bitterness. “That’s the point, isn’t it? You wanted to work in the White House, but you didn’t get brought to the dance.” Cohen rejected that portrayal: “Sir, I was extremely proud to be personal attorney to the president of the United States. I did not want to go to the White House.” That was demonstrably untrue; he had desperately wanted the chief of staff position.118
Cohen testified about his belief that the president had known about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lawyer to get “dirt on Hillary” ahead of time: “I remember being in the room with Mr. Trump, probably in early June 2016, when something peculiar happened. Don Jr. came into the room and walked behind his father’s desk—which in itself was unusual. People didn’t just walk behind Mr. Trump’s desk to talk to him. I recalled Don Jr. leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying: ‘The meeting is all set.’ I remember Mr. Trump saying, ‘Ok good . . . let me know.’ ”119 What meeting? This allegation had no evidentiary value whatsoever.
Cohen offered up sexy tidbits, saying he’d pursued buying a supposed tape of Trump striking his wife, Melania, in a Moscow elevator in order to destroy it. But he had determined that the tape didn’t exist—nor did he believe that the event had occurred. He’d also pursued the allegation that Trump had had a “love child,” only to become convinced that that claim was phony as well. The “pee tape” was another fabrication. “I have no reason to believe that that tape exists,” Cohen said.120
The most provocative claim Cohen offered was that he’d been listening on speakerphone in July 2016 when Trump had taken a call from Roger Stone, who said “he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” The drop occurred on July 22. Even as Cohen testified, WikiLeaks responded via its Twitter account: “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.”121
Cohen insisted that his false written statement about the negotiations of the Trump Moscow project ending in January 2016 had been edited and reviewed by Trump’s attorneys, including Jay Sekulow and Abbe Lowell. (This was refuted by the attorneys as “completely false.” Documents showed that the date mentioned in the original draft written by Cohen was January 2016.)122
Among his false statements during the hearing: “I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from Mr. Trump.”123 But in the spring of 2018, after the raids, Cohen had instructed one of his attorneys at the time, Stephen Ryan, to ask the president’s attorneys about a possible pardon. (He had been rebuffed, according to Giuliani.)124
The world saw a liar, lashing out at “the boss” he’d once idolized. Cohen knew that no pardon would be forthcoming, so he pandered to the Trump haters. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen called Cohen’s testimony the “bombshell that didn’t explode.” Cohen’s statement that Trump hadn’t thought he was going to win the election “kind of undermines the argument” that Trump wanted to pay off Stormy Daniels to help his chances.125
The Cohen dumpster fire raged for seven hours, convincing viewers that the attorney had schemed and lied and peddled his connection to Trump to rake in millions of dollars. But if Mueller had hoped that Cohen would prove Russia collusion, it was a humiliating fail. Cohen had every motive to lie, to say he had been to Prague and had negotiated with Russians. He didn’t. Instead he offered exculpatory evidence that the entire Mueller investigation was a fraud.
In his closing remarks, Cohen joined hands with the #Resistance: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” His concern for the future was “why I agreed to appear before you today.”126 That was the dumbest, most partisan statement he could have made. Perhaps Lanny Davis, who had had experience with Hillary’s unwillingness to face her 2016 election loss, wrote it for him.
Cohen’s performance led Representatives Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows to write a letter to the newly sworn
-in attorney general, William Barr, alleging that Cohen had committed perjury. They cited Cohen’s statements that he had “never defrauded any bank” and that he hadn’t sought employment in the White House. His claim that he had not sought a pardon had also been false. Cohen’s testimony “was a spectacular and brazen attempt to knowing and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to numerous material facts,” the letter said. “Mr. Cohen’s prior conviction for lying to Congress merits a heightened suspicion that he has yet again testified falsely before Congress.”127
Cohen wasn’t finished. The following day, he met with the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door session, where, Representative Adam Schiff said, the committee was able to “drill down” on certain issues in more detail. It emerged that Cohen had met several times with Schiff’s staff before the public hearing without telling the Republicans, raising the possibility that he had been “coached.”128 Or had Schiff’s team written some of his anti-Trump comments?
Schiff and his subordinates wanted ammunition to use in a Trump impeachment, but Cohen had lied to lawyers, the IRS, his accountants, bank officials, and Congress, making him useless as a witness against the president.
Cohen testified a final time behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee in early March 2019. Representative Devin Nunes, the ranking member, called that pointless exercise just part of the Democrats’ ”building out a narrative.” Cohen had no classified information to impart. “They want to keep it behind closed doors so that they can conveniently say, well, we can’t talk about what happened behind closed doors. . . . [The] guy has no classified information. It’s ridiculous.” He said that Cohen’s public testimony had been “great for Republicans, it was great for Donald Trump, because we now know that the dossier was total bunk.”129
On May 6, Cohen reported to federal prison in Otisville, New York, to begin serving his sentence.130 His Shakespearean fall from Trump’s inner circle was complete. George Sorial, a Trump Organization executive vice president and its chief compliance officer, told the Wall Street Journal that Cohen had lasted a decade at the company despite his shortcomings as a lawyer because “he was loyal. . . . Some very bad people with an anti-Trump agenda led him astray.”
That included Davis, the Mueller team, and the SDNY prosecutors, who had cleverly turned a noncrime into a crime and convinced Cohen to go along with it. He had been particularly ill served by an attorney/adviser long afflicted with Clinton-itis. Either Davis had manipulated Cohen, or the two had worked in concert to target Trump. Why Cohen trusted Davis remains a mystery.
Maybe his bitterness at being left behind by “the boss” whom he’d once pledged “to take a bullet for” explains it. But in the end, Cohen’s lies finally caught up with him.
Chapter 8
Collateral Damage
Throughout the interview, Flynn had a very “sure” demeanor and did not give any indicators of deception. Strzok and [redacted FBI agent] both had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying.
—FBI REPORT ON I NTERVIEW WITH LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL FLYNN, JULY 19, 2017
Four days after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, FBI director James Comey did something he knew was out of line: he told his second in command, Andrew McCabe, to send two FBI agents to interview Trump’s new national security advisor, retired army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, about his phone conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition.
“I sent them,” Comey admitted to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. By so doing, he had gone around standard practice, which he knew well from years of experience, as he pointed out: “In the George W. Bush administration or the Obama administration, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, and there would be discussions and approvals and who would be there.”1
The Plot to Implicate Michael Flynn
Comey wanted to avoid going through official channels. His move was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more . . . organized administration.” The key phrase is “maybe gotten away with.”2
He and McCabe had a scheme in mind: laying a trap for the retired general, who had been forced from his role as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Barack Obama in 2014 for expressing opinions at odds with the administration’s stance on Iran and other national security issues. They wanted to disrupt the new administration, get revenge on a man who had been a thorn in Obama’s side, and supercharge the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
Before Trump took office, on January 5, 2017, Comey had met with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Vice President Joe Biden, and Obama at the White House. That was the meeting Rice memorialized in an email to herself on Inauguration Day: “The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book. . . . From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming [Trump] team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”3
Joseph diGenova, a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia, has charged that this unusual meeting was held to discuss targeting Flynn.4 They despised and feared him, as they despised and feared Trump. They would use Flynn’s perfectly legal and appropriate communications with the Russian ambassador during the transition period and twist them into something nefarious.
Highly decorated, with thirty-three years in the army, Flynn had served multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, building a reputation as a maverick “known for his candor and his unorthodox sensibilities about intelligence and military operations.”5
He had led the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, trying to overhaul the way the military treats intelligence.6 And he had repeatedly challenged Obama’s foreign policy related to military action.7
In his last interview as director of the DIA, Flynn had said he was being forced into retirement for questioning Obama’s public statements that al-Qaeda was near defeat.8 Under Flynn, the DIA had sent numerous classified warnings about the “dire consequences of toppling Syrian President Bashar Assad” that had been ignored.
Former DIA official W. Patrick Lang summarized it thus: “Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria . . . they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.”9
Flynn opened Flynn Intel Group, a private consulting firm, with his son, Michael G. Flynn.10 Building on contacts in Russia, he became a regular guest on RT, formerly Russia Today, a media outlet widely thought to be financed by the Kremlin. In December 2015, he traveled with his son to Moscow to attend a gala for the network, sitting next to President Vladimir Putin—a trip undertaken with the approval of the Pentagon. Paid a fee through a speakers’ bureau, Flynn gave an interview to one of the network’s top presenters.11
Though he had called Putin a “dictator” and a “thug,” Flynn also advocated for a rapprochement with Russia, enabling both countries to focus on fighting Islamic terrorism.12
Everything about Flynn was anathema to Obama, Rice, Brennan, and Clapper.13 Flynn knew the rot that existed within Clapper’s and Brennan’s intelligence agencies. Who knew what radical changes he might undertake? What he might discover about their spying activities?
In late July 2016, not long after Flynn’s book The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Enemies was released, John Brennan issued an EC, or electronic communication, to Comey, which became the basis of an FBI enterprise counterintelligence investigation dubbed “Operation Crossfire Hurricane.” The EC named four Trump campaign associates as targets: George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. FBI counterinte
lligence agent Peter Strzok signed the document opening the aptly named inquiry—which would rely on intelligence assets from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy—on July 31.14
The investigation of Flynn was “based on his relationship with the Russian government,” according to Comey and a DOJ official.15 What relationship? Attending a dinner in Moscow? Giving a speech? Talking to the ambassador? The Flynn investigation was built on sand.
“ ‘Because of the sensitivity of the matter,’ the FBI did not notify congressional leadership about this investigation during the FBI’s regular counterintelligence briefings,” according to a report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).16 Comey didn’t want the Bureau’s overseers to know they were targeting a political campaign.
“This was a designed plot to frame General Flynn so they could figure out a way to go after Donald Trump,” said diGenova.17
Though the probe was opened in late July, by December little had been gleaned that could be used against Flynn. The investigation needed a big push. On December 29, 2016, Obama’s intelligence apparatus issued a Joint Analysis Report (JAR) alleging that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election through hacking and propaganda spread by media outlet RT.
The JAR, in which the administration referred to Russian cyberactivity as “Grizzly Steppe,” provided little evidence to tie senior officers of Russian intelligence services to the plan to influence the election.18 Even so, the Obama administration ejected thirty-five suspected Russian spies, closed several of their compounds, and imposed sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services.19
Witch Hunt Page 37