By February 2018, Trump had Stormy Daniels on his mind.
The president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified Wednesday at a House Oversight Committee hearing that Trump told him what to say regarding whether he was being reimbursed for a $130,000 hush money payment.
Cohen had told journalists that he wasn’t reimbursed for the payment by the Trump campaign or Trump organization, leaving out the president himself.
“The statement is not false,” Cohen said, in response to questions from Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA). “I purposefully left out Mr. Trump, individually, from that statement.”
After Rep. Hill pressed Cohen on why he phrased the statement to leave out the president, he replied: “Because that’s what was discussed to do between myself, Mr. Trump, and [Trump Org CFO] Alan Weisselberg.”
Separately, a Vanity Fair reporter wrote at the time that Cohen fielded a call from Trump during an interview. During the call, the reporter noted that the two may have been discussing messaging around the issue.
Cohen confirmed that during the hearing, saying Trump told him to state publicly
“that he was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and that he wasn’t knowledgeable of my actions.”
That’s a nice detail to be added in, and it points to the larger picture where Trump is directing the messaging about all of these things swirling around him. That points to him trying to interfere in ways we don’t know about yet, but may find out about in the Mueller report. That’s really a hook into conspiracy and cover up, and hopefully people keep following the crumbs to find the meal.
Anybody who knows a narcissistic control-freak like Trump (and most of us DO) understands that Trump would never, EVER allow someone like Cohen to talk to ANYBODY about something that could embarrass Trump without direct, detailed instructions from Trump on how to respond to queries about it.
Rep. Cummings…time to subpoena Jay Sekulow and Allen Weisselberg.
That’s if Mueller and SDNY are finished with him.
Since Republicans are totally void of any originality whatsoever, and since I am conveniently obsessed with the Iran Contra Scandal and how a senile Ronald Reagan was able to pull off plausible deniability because he was too old, and everyone did all these things without specifically informing me etc, I note the attempt to reprise the Fig Leaf Defense here…that all these people did all these horrible things on their own and did not include me in their high handed unilateral decisions.
As @khaaannn notes, that is not gonna fly with Donald Trump.