CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The way that one Washington Post columnist summarized yesterday's congressional hearing, Donald Trump is guilty of 5 felonies if Michael Cohen told the truth.
So how did the Republicans on the committee deal with these allegations? Did they try to provide a credible refutation of the charges themselves? No. They slammed Cohen for being a pathological liar.
But a deeper implication of their remarks seems to have been lost on them. Perhaps without realizing it, they were making the case that Donald Trump either has remarkably poor judgment about the people he hires or that he prefers to hire pathological liars.
The irony of those remarks seems to have been lost on them.
And the sheer unadulterated nastiness of their words and tone also seems to have escaped them. But this is the picture we are getting of the present day Republican Party.
Remember that these were Trump's biggest supporters, and they were going after one of Trump's closest associates.
Is Trump deeply naive, or does he prefer to hire crooks and liars? I think we can conclude that the latter conclusion is the correct one -- Trump needs to hire liars. Just think back on the series of press secretaries who have rotated through the position. Trump finally found Sarah Huckabee Sanders -- somebody who lies almost as well as he does.
It will be interesting to see whether these same Republican committee members go after subsequent witnesses in the same way, thereby making the case that Trump hires the worst people, in spite of his campaign promises to the contrary.
It is time, halfway through Trump's term in office, to remind the American people of Trump's promise that he would bring in the best people to advise him. Are Michael Cohen and Huckabee Sanders what he meant by that? Or consider the disgraced cabinet officers who have had to resign. At this point, that claim about bringing in only the best people goes along with the claim that we will do so much winning that we will get tired of it. I must confess that I'm not yet tired of all the winning.
The Al Capone Analogy
Cohen's main thrust at Trump was the cover-up of payoffs to Stormy Daniels, not because it is a bigger story than the President of the United States being beholden to Vladimir Putin, but because Cohen brought tangible evidence to the hearing. TV news kept showing the check made out to Cohen. The Republicans on the committee were not effective in shaking the assertion that Trump had participated in an illegal payoff. That cancelled check wouldn't go away.
It's a popular cliche that the feds got Al Capone for tax evasion, not for murder or for selling booze. What's missing in this formulation is that Capone had become entirely contemptuous of the law, and violated pretty much any law that he found to be inconvenient. Prosecutors could therefore pick and choose among a variety of subjects.
Wednesday's testimony provided a portrait of Trump that has been likened to that of a mob boss. (Cohen's testimony of how Trump communicated the official lie of the day was telling.) It's not surprising that there would be some paper trail somewhere, and in this case it happened to be the payoff check.
We can look forward to more congressional inquiries and more revelations. Michael Cohen opened the door to inquiry about Trump misstating his financial worth upwards in order to get bank loans and downward in order to pay less in taxes. We will undoubtedly be hearing more about this -- another iteration of the Al Capone rule -- as this committee gets going.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
