He put the frighteners on him
Michael D. Cohen, the former personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump, has indefinitely postponed his congressional testimony, his lawyer said in a statement on Wednesday, citing Mr. Trump’s verbal attacks on Mr. Cohen’s family in the days since he scheduled his appearance on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Cohen was to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Feb. 7 at the invitation of Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the chairman of the committee, but backed out because of ongoing threats against his family, his lawyer Lanny Davis said in a statement.
President’s former lawyer puts hold on testimony to Congress because of president’s threats. Are we gangstered up enough yet?
Mr. Trump denied that he was outright threatening his former lawyer, telling reporters in the White House that Mr. Cohen has “only been threatened by the truth.”
He wasn’t outright threatening, he was implicitly threatening. World of difference. Aren’t we all proud to be Americans today.
Mr. Cummings said that Mr. Cohen had “legitimate concerns” for his family’s safety. “Efforts to intimidate witnesses, scare their family members, or prevent them from testifying before Congress are textbook mob tactics that we condemn in the strongest terms,” he said in a joint statement with Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Our nation’s laws prohibit efforts to discourage, intimidate, or otherwise pressure a witness not to provide testimony to Congress.”
And along with that, it’s kind of frowned on. It’s seen as not altogether respectable to make efforts to discourage, intimidate, or otherwise pressure a witness not to provide testimony to Congress, especially when the person making the efforts is the president. It doesn’t look good.
Mr. Cohen’s willingness to tell prosecutors and the public what he knows about any possible involvement by Mr. Trump in the crimes he has already admitted to has emerged as one of the biggest threats to the Trump presidency. Mr. Cohen has spent more than 70 hours with investigators for the Southern District of New York who prosecuted the campaign finance violations and for the special counsel investigating Russia’s election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested on Twitter that Mr. Cohen’s family members be investigated. In a recent interview with Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host and one of Mr. Trump’s preferred interviewers, he called for Mr. Cohen’s father-in-law to be investigated without citing details.
When Ms. Pirro pressed for the name of the father-in-law, Mr. Trump demurred but said, “You’ll look into it because nobody knows what’s going on over there.”
Abuse of power much?
That interview prompted a rare statement from House Democrats cautioning that any effort to discourage or influence witness testimony before Congress could be construed as a crime.
“The integrity of our process to serve as an independent check on the executive branch must be respected by everyone, including the president,” the Democrats said in the statement. “Our nation’s laws prohibit efforts to discourage, intimidate, or otherwise pressure a witness not to provide testimony to Congress.“
It should have been a statement from the entire Congress. We get more filthy every day.
I’m not sure it’s possible to get much filthier. At some point, you reach a level of so much maximum filth, anything else isn’t really filthier, it’s just filth on top of filth on top of filth, but the same nasty old filth, all you can carry.
When will we be filth saturated?
Obstruction. Are we there yet?
That was some third world dictator shit, musing about “investigating” Cohen’s family. The only “excuse” you can offer for Trump’s behavior is that it’s no big deal because his Department of Justice knows better than to listen to what he says.
“Don’t worry, folks. The president isn’t abusing his power; the people who work for him don’t take him seriously. Make Amercia Great Again! Woo hoo!”
But this was musing aloud on a Fox show. It could get freelancers worked up. I don’t think Cohen’s family is afraid of law enforcement but of trumpies inspired by his tv-threats.
I don’t want to get into victim blaming but it’s not as though Cohen didn’t know this would happen. He’d worked as the fixer for a mafiosa-type Trump for enough years to know what to expect when he turned against the boss. He knew for certain that he would be putting the safety of his family in jeopardy, and he can’t claim to have offered information on Trump out of some notion of serving the greater good, he did so merely to save himself from a long prison sentence, so forgive me if I lack sympathy for him. His family, however, knowing now (if they didn’t all along) the danger Cohen has willingly put them in, ought to be disowning him as publically as possible.
I would have expected a sudden flood of ‘churnalism’ about the father-in-law. This doesn’t seem to have happened. Is Trump’s threat so empty that his sponsors on Fox etc. don’t bother to follow up for him?
Apparently Cohen’s father-in-law really is (alleged to be) involved in organized crime, according to stories I read quite a while ago, pre-flip. So Trump isn’t making that up out of whole cloth. But it’s not like that was some big secret, either, and it didn’t stop Trump from employing Cohen in the first place.
Screechy, why would it have stopped him? It’s always good to make family connections in the business. When things go well, one big happy (crime) family. When things go sour, family is leverage.