Michael Cohen’s testimony yesterday implicated Donald Trump in a Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, according to a former federal prosecutor.
The president claimed after Cohen’s daylong congressional testimony that his former personal attorney had cleared him of any charges in the so-called “Russian hoax.” But former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade in an artile today in The Daily Beast maintains that Cohen had actually bolstered the criminal case against Trump as well as other members of his inner circle, including his oldest son, Don Jr.
Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee that he overheard Trump speaking to longtime friend Roger Stone on speakerphone in the summer of 2016.
In the conversation Stone told Trump that 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. According to McQuade that evidence puts the president very close to a conspiracy which has already been charged by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller has 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.
According to McQuade:
“If Mueller can establish that Stone, Trump or others participated in the same conspiracy, 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, made clear that making a legal case of criminal conspiracy requires proving only the following elements:
- knowledge that a crime is committed,
- an agreement that some member of the group will break the law, and
- the commission of at least one overt act to carry out that agreement.
“The agreement may be explicit or implicit,” she clarified. Then she added:
“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 members of Congress that the president was also aware of Donald Trump Jr.’s efforts to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton offered by a Russian lawyer at the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. She also implicated Trump’s son in the president’s own scheme 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. Then she concluded by writing:
“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.”
“President Trump may get his wall built after all, just not the kind he had envisioned.”
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