One of the reporters behind the controversial BuzzFeed report in January about President Trump ordering his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, which was publicly discredited by special counsel Robert Mueller, refuses to open up about how the story came together.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Jason Leopold also defended his bombshell report with BuzzFeed colleague Anthony Cormier in the face of Cohen’s public testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday in which he denied the president ever directly instructed him to mislead lawmakers — an action for which he has been prosecuted.
Leopold repeatedly asserted he could not or would not discuss the documents and sources that were used as the foundation of his work, citing an aggressive leak investigation by the Trump administration looking for two unnamed law enforcement officials who served as sources. Leopold said, “I don’t even want to discuss” the documents he and Cormier reported were obtained by Mueller’s office.
Although he acknowledged Cormier had in prior interviews acknowledged how their sources claimed to have seen the documents but he himself had not, Leopold said he would not further the conversation.
“I know. I understand that. He was on ‘Reliable Sources’ and was asked the same question. But, again, there have been calls for a leak investigation. This administration, this Justice Department has been very aggressive about that, and I just cannot discuss,” Leopold said.
Leopold was also asked to address Cohen’s public testimony and whether it discredited his reporting. Cohen told lawmakers, under oath, that his former boss “did not directly” instruct him to lie to Congress about his business dealings with Russia, but rather signaled “in his way” that he should lie.
Leopold argued Cohen “confirmed the central thesis of our report,” which he described as furthering the information given in Cohen’s sentencing memo.
When confronted about the wording in the report, which said the the alleged order from Trump to Cohen was “the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia,” Leopold blamed critics for playing the semantic game.
“Those people are seizing onto Cohen’s use of the word ‘directly.’ The president didn’t ‘directly tell me to lie.’ That’s an adverb that characterizes the underlying instruction to lie. And Cohen says almost immediately after that that the president was telling him to lie ‘in his way,'” Leopold said. “So there is no longer any question about the direction Trump gave Cohen. The debate is now about how the direction was given, and a lot of people don’t want to admit that they were wrong.”
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith has said his team stands by its reporting and called on Mueller’s office to further clarify what it was disputing. Mueller’s spokesman Peter Carr said in a rare statement a day after the report was published: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.”
According to emails obtained by the Washington Post, Carr initially declined to provide a response to a BuzzFeed reporter when he was asked about an upcoming story “stating that Michael Cohen was directed by President Trump himself to lie to Congress about his negotiations related to the Trump Moscow project.” However, the report that was published went further, claiming that Cohen had told Mueller the president instructed him to lie and that Mueller’s office had learned about Trump’s orders through a witness from the Trump Organization as well as messages and documents. It wasn’t until 24 hours later, after congressional Democrats began clamoring for investigations and stirring up talk of impeachment, that Carr released the on-the-record statement.
Even as Leopold insisted he is hamstrung from discussing the nuts and bolts of his report due to the Trump administration’s leak inquiry, the reporter said he is taking action to learn more about the special counsel’s office’s stunning rebuke of his report.
“I filed several FOIA requests with the Department of Justice, the office of the special counsel, with the hopes of prying loose a wide range of records that would lay bare what took place behind the scenes, that could shed light on that decision-making process on the decision to release that unprecedented statement,” he said.
