Three years ago, Michael Cohen was vice president of the multi-billion dollar Trump Organization and fixer to the future leader of the free world. Now, the disbarred lawyer and convicted felon is set to testify publicly in front of the House Oversight Committee. If the opening statement published by the New York Times is indeed correct, it proves that he’s a man with nothing to lose.
Cohen, who spent decades in the service of President Trump, burying bodies and paying off porn stars, now calls Trump a “racist,” a “cheat,” and a “con man.” But while his complete 180 on his former boss is no secret, most explosive in Cohen’s supposed prepared statements is the assertion that Roger Stone told Trump that WikiLeaks was about to dump hacked DNC emails before the beginning of the Democratic National Convention.
Cohen has nuked his ability to appeal to Trump for a pardon. In theory, he has no reason to hold back. But this assertion from a known liar, hack, and immoral emissary includes one detail that may just take his claim too far.
Cohen says:
That Trump would call Stone in the wee small hours of the morning from a blocked number is no secret at this point. It is possible that Trump lied to special counsel Robert Mueller in his written assertion that Stone did not inform him of the WikiLeaks hack prior to the email dump. But it is very unlikely that Stone and Julian Assange, one of the most wanted and surveilled men in the Western world, could be making literal phone calls to each other without accidentally putting dozens of democratic governments on blast.
Consider, Assange can’t even keep his room at the Ecuadorian Embassy messy without it becoming international news. We’re now just supposed to believe that he was making phone calls to the country’s most notorious political trickster willy-nilly, and not one intelligence agency picked up on it?
It’s also possible that Stone simply lied to Cohen and Trump, and that Stone really did warn them about the email dump while embellishing the emails somewhat.
Or Michael Cohen is just a really bad lawyer who made a major boo-boo prior to one of the most explosive testimonies of the decade.
