Tremors Are Cracking the Trump Walls... and Michael Cohen is Holding the Jackhammer

Now that Trump has finally submitted his written answers regarding collusion to Mueller’s team, probably with the help of communications from Paul Manafort’s legal team, thus locking in his testimony, things are finally getting interesting. Today Trump’s now-turned former long time attorney and fixer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump’s Russian business dealings, specifically the eventually abandoned project for licensing a Trump Tower in Moscow. Although initially claimed to have been abandoned in January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses, Cohen now admits this continued through June 2016, with Trump’s and his family’s knowledge. This further expands the tangled web of lies by multiple Trump associates both during and following his campaign. The importance of this revelation is that this MAY contradict Trump’s written answers to questions about this, which itself would be a crime, although he presumably can’t be indicted while in office. It certainly seems to contradict Trump’s consistent narrative that he had no financial dealings with any Russians or the Russian government. And now, in addition to again calling Cohen a liar (even though his team has said that this is consistent with Trump’s story!), he is falsely claiming that everyone knew about this deal at the time, even though it did not become widely known until 2017! Still, this potential lie alone is unlikely to have any significant ramifications for Trump. However, the major question looms about what else Michael Cohen has told Mueller’s team in his reportedly 70 hours(!!) of discussions with them, and what of this can be corroborated. Probably the two biggest potential prizes would be showing that Trump did know at the time about the infamous in 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the Russian government lawyer, and that he knew about contact and even coordination with WikiLeaks regarding the release of the hacked emails. Either of those would be huge bombshells, probably sufficient for impeachment, if the new House Dem’s in charge have the guts to do it. All this probably accounts for Trump’s increasingly rabid and frequent Twitter attacks on Mueller. We are still waiting to find out what lies Mueller has caught Paul Manafort telling while supposedly cooperating, and whether any of that will demonstrate any of Trump’s written answers to be lies. And of course we are all anxiously awaiting further indictments!

In the immediate aftermath of the Cohen revelations, Trump has just canceled his scheduled meeting with Putin at the G20 summit, reportedly due to the recent Russian-Ukrainian incident. Although that is a plausible excuse, any traditional and competent POTUS would instead meet with and confront Putin about this blatant Russian aggression. But aside from his continued strange love affair with Putin, like any bully, Trump is simply incapable of confronting anyone he perceives to be stronger than himself!

As an amusing aside, I want to quote one of Trump’s most asinine comments on climate change during his recent visit to California: “ I want great climate, and we’re going to have that!” As if he can control the climate! Why not? He is very used to promising lots of things to lots of people whether he can deliver them or not, like more car manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, which doesn’t look so good now that GM is planning to close several plants and cut almost 15,000 jobs!