DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Trump Commits Obstruction of Justice (Per Attorney General Nominee), Again: Trump Ordered Cohen to Lie To Congress

According to a new report from BuzzFeed, U.S. President Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

The report, published late Thursday evening, cited two federal law enforcement officials involved in investigating the matter. NBC News has not independently confirmed the report.

Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about a proposed Trump real estate project in Russia and the extent of the president’s involvement in and knowledge of that deal. The project never came to fruition.

Prosecutors said Cohen lied in order to minimize links between Trump and his Moscow building project, and to give the false impression that the project had died before the Iowa caucuses in February 2016, the first contest on the path toward a presidential nomination.

At that time, Trump accused his former fixer of lying about his admissions in order to “get a reduced sentence.”

“He’s a weak person and not a very smart person,” Trump said.

When Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December it was for several crimes, including campaign finance violations he said Trump directed him to carry out.

According to the BuzzFeed report, the two law enforcement sources said Cohen told Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that Trump personally told him to lie in order to hide the real estate mogul’s ties to the Moscow negotiations. Mueller is investigating potential links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

As for the BuzzFeed report, the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC sent late Thursday. The Washington Post quoted Trump’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as saying, “If you believe Cohen I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

The Associated Press, meanwhile, received a similar response from the former New York City mayor: “If you believe Cohen I can get you a good all cash deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Notably, BuzzFeed reported that Mueller’s office learned about Trump’s alleged order for Cohen to lie through “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.” Cohen, the report said, then subsequently acknowledged that directive.

Lanny Davis, who is Cohen’s legal and communications advisor, declined to comment on the BuzzFeed story “out of respect for Mr. Mueller’s and the Office of Special Counsel’s investigation.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said in a Twitter post that the allegation against Trump in the BuzzFeed article “is among the most serious to date.”

During his confirmation hearing before Congress, President Donald Trump's pick to head the Department of Justice, William Barr, says coaching a witness to give false testimony or to conceal evidence would be obstruction of justice.

if Trump is guilty of this. If he is he will be removed.

Congressmen calling for details from Mueller this morning, saying this cannot wait.

According to the BuzzFeed report, the two law enforcement sources

According to buzzfeed, two unnamed sources say.....


This is how we are accepting our news now? Fake Dossier posting Buzzfeed has two anonymous sources and we are accepting this?

Once upon a time Deepthroat was an unnamed source...

Just because the two sources are unnamed in the article, doesn't mean they don't have names and aren't real people with real information. Journalists keep their sources unnamed to protect the sources identities from harm or intimidation, both of which I feel confident this administration is capable of.

It also doesn't mean that those sources even exist. Something I feel fully confident Buzzfeed is capable of.

They've gotten 8 Pulitzer nominations since they opened 3 years ago. The people making quizzes aren't part of their political wing.

So I guess the Washington Post was trash when it outed Nixon using Deepthroat as it's unnamed source?

I don't understand your issue with unnamed sources. You're saying it's unacceptable and that's weird. It's only unacceptable if there is no source, and we don't know that yet. You're jumping to conclusions.

didn't buzzfeed get sued, retract, and apologize to people included in the story about the dossier not being verified and false reporting, in the past?

The constant trend of the leftist on this board is to ignore the content and attack the source.....unless of course it confirms their bias.

yo, BpG literally just said this in the other thread:



and yet look at his post in here. lmfao you can't make this up.

I agree with them doing that. We need answers, and trump also needs to be honest about this.

According to buzzfeed, two unnamed sources say.....


This is how we are accepting our news now? Fake Dossier posting Buzzfeed has two anonymous sources and we are accepting this?

Just listened to NPR who had 5 minutes on this item. They noted that Buzzfeed is somewhat respected within journalistic circles and the authors of the article are both journalists who have won awards - one a Pulitzer. It might not be 'gospel' - but I'm willing to give more credence to reports from eminent journalists who have stellar reputations.

Everybody knew. Everybody of consequence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department understood fully in the middle of 2016—as the FBI embarked on its counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump—that it was doing so based on disinformation provided by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That’s the big revelation from the transcript of the testimony Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave Congress in August. The transcripts haven’t been released, but parts were confirmed for me by congressional sources.

Mr. Ohr testified that he sat down with dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016, and received salacious information the opposition researcher had compiled on Mr. Trump. Mr. Ohr immediately took that to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andy McCabe and lawyer Lisa Page. In August he took it to Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator. In the same month, Mr. Ohr believes, he briefed senior personnel in the Justice Department’s criminal division: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz, lawyer Zainab Ahmad and fraud unit head Andrew Weissman. The last two now work for special counsel Robert Mueller.

More important, Mr. Ohr told this team the information came from the Clinton camp and warned that it was likely biased, certainly unproven. “When I provided [the Steele information] to the FBI, I tried to be clear that this is source information,” he testified. “I don’t know how reliable it is. You’re going to have to check it out and be aware. These guys were hired by somebody relating to—who’s related to the Clinton campaign, and be aware.”

He said he told them that Mr. Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” and that his own wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier. He confirmed sounding all these warnings before the FBI filed its October application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. We broke some of this in August, though the transcript provides new detail.

The FBI and Justice Department have gone to extraordinary lengths to muddy these details, with cover from Democrats and friendly journalists. A January 2017 memo from Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, flatly (and incorrectly) insisted “the FBI’s closely-held investigative team only received Steele’s reporting in mid-September.” A May 2018 New York Times report repeated that claim, saying Mr. Steele’s reports didn’t reach the “Crossfire Hurricane team,” which ran the counterintelligence investigation, until “mid-September.”

This line was essential for upholding the claim that the dossier played no role in the unprecedented July 31, 2016, decision to investigate a presidential campaign. Former officials have insisted they rushed to take this dramatic step on the basis of a conversation involving a low-level campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, which took place in May, before the dossier officially came into the picture. And maybe that is the case. Yet now Mr. Ohr has testified that top personnel had dossier details around the time they opened the probe.

The Ohr testimony is also further evidence that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in its Page warrant application. We already knew the bureau failed to inform the court it knew the dossier had come from a rival campaign. But the FISA application additionally claimed the FBI was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to Mr. Steele, that he was “reliable,” that his “reporting” in this case was “credible.” and that the FBI only “speculates” that Mr. Steele’s bosses “likely” wanted to “discredit” Mr. Trump.

Speculates? Likely? Mr. Ohr makes clear FBI and Justice officials knew from the earliest days that Mr. Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, which had an obvious desire to discredit Mr. Trump. And Mr. Ohr specifically told investigators that they had every reason to worry Mr. Steele’s work product was tainted.

This testimony has two other implications. First, it further demonstrates the accuracy of the House Intelligence Committee Republicans’ memo of 2018—which noted Mr. Ohr’s role and pointed out that the FBI had not been honest about its knowledge of the dossier and failed to inform the court of Mrs. Ohr’s employment at Fusion GPS. The testimony also destroys any remaining credibility of the Democratic response, in which Mr. Schiff and his colleagues claimed Mr. Ohr hadn’t met with the FBI or told them anything about his wife or about Mr. Steele’s bias until after the election.


Second, the testimony raises new concerns about Mr. Mueller’s team. Critics have noted Mr. Weissman’s donations to Mrs. Clinton and his unseemly support of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s obstruction of Trump orders. It now turns out that senior Mueller players were central to the dossier scandal. The conflicts of interest boggle the mind.

The Ohr testimony is evidence the FBI itself knows how seriously it erred. The FBI has been hiding and twisting facts from the start.

Write to kim@wsj.com.