On catch and kill, Cohen: “These catch and kill scenarios existed between David Pecker and Mr. Trump long before I started working for him in 2007.”
As we get ready for the questioning today I wanted to flag some early posts from early 2017 as I was looking into Michael Cohen’s background, his business history, ties to Russian emigres and Russian organized crime and his relationship with Trump himself. They hold up pretty well, though we of course know much more now. It’s All So Confusing (The Michael Cohen File). What Happened to the Michael Cohen Ukraine Dossier? “‘Says Who?’ – Piecing Together the Michael Story.” “What the CIA and FBI Knew About Trump Before 2016.”
Finally, from earlier this morning, my look at what was significant in Cohen’s prepared testimony this morning.
There was a key point in Chairman Cummings opening statement that is worth noting. He said that he’d agreed with the DOJ and the House Intelligence committee that his committee would not ask questions about Russia. He then noted that Cohen had nonetheless brought up Russia in his opening statement and that members of the committee they would be able to ask about those points – Stone and Wikileaks, the Trump Tower Moscow project and the Trump Tower meeting.
Cummings then made a key point, that those issues “do not raise concerns with the Department of Justice” but that there were other Russia topics that were still subjects of on-going investigation and thus remain off limits.
Video after the jump … Read More
Out of the gate, House Republicans demand that the Cohen hearing be postponed because he didn’t give them his testimony long enough in advance.
Out of the gate, GOP demands Cohen hearing be canceled/postponed. pic.twitter.com/ZXf6HFdm4d
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 27, 2019
This was followed by claims that CNN had gotten the testimony first, seemingly an homage to the Roger Stone arrest conspiracy theory.
10:18 AM: Here’s my run-down of Cohen’s prepared testimony.
In the first of what will certainly be many attacks today, Rudy Giuliani is out with a round of attacks on Michael Cohen. A central one is that Cohen was “connected to Russian organized crime” and that – relatedly – he got his money from his Ukrainian immigrant father-in-law Fima Shusterman. You’ve seen me writing for months about Trump’s odd gambit and history with Shusterman. I’ve been writing for two years about Cohen’s ties to Russian/Ukrainian organized crime. Rudy is not making this up. But in the nature of things, with the current questions before the public, accusing Trump’s former fixer of being tied to Russian organized crime seems like a perilous line of attack.
Before we get started, here are some key passages in Cohen’s testimony. There’s a lot of stuff in there. But here are four key pages. Read More
This bada boom bada bing style threat from Rep. Matt Gaetz is so specific and so careful to invoke Cohen’s father-in-law it is highly, highly likely that it originates from Trump or the Trump family.
An even more probable connection, as someone just flagged to me: Where do you think Enquirer Tablord David Pecker fits into this?
Latest: Even better, Gaetz tells Sam Stein that his gangster threat is “what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas.”
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader MO …
What we have now is a fiat currency pretending it’s still on a gold standard. That is, we have a financial system designed around using the natural scarcity of commodity commodity money, but we’ve abandoned commodity money. oddly, we persist in acting like money is in natural limited supply, and we can only get more of it by taking taxes, say.
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader A …
Hi, Josh. I’m an economist and Prime member (hoping to upgrade soon but have to convince hubs of necessity of expense first…). I read you every day, and the work you and your staff do is indispensable.
I just read your MMT post, and it is spot on. I would go even further. I consider MMTers to be the left-wing equivalent of Hayek/gold standard acolytes. Both of them defy what we know about how the economy works, theoretically and empirically.
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader PJ …
I read with interest your thoughts on MMT, and am in the kind of academic circles where people will give talks where they think about and discuss MMT as part of some suite of solutions to the excesses or problems of late capitalism (or even straight up liberalism, in the conventional sense). I think perhaps both you and Matt are focusing too much on the practicalities of MMT rather than its rhetorical function, though there might be reasons to maintain the skepticism, there’s another possibility about policy facilitation therein.