Earlier this week President Trump’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to giving false statements to congress about his client’s ties to Russia. According to Cohen’s new testimony, he continued to work on a “Moscow project” well into Trump’s 2016 campaign – for at least 6 months after the date on which he had previously assured Congress that such work had ceased – in fact right up to the eve of Trump’s nomination.
Tweeting from the G20 summit in Argentina, Trump’s dismissal of the news betrayed a nervousness which has become more noticeable as the Mueller investigation closes in on the president and his inner circle. Trump’s assertion that he had: ”Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project” can no longer withstand scrutiny in light of Mueller’s evidence.
While repeated cries of “Witch Hunt!” may reassure Trump’s base, the Democrats’ control of Congress after the midterm elections will allow them to use evidence like this to place the president under much greater legal and political pressure. More importantly, his response seemed to miss, or deliberately ignore, the key point. The question is not whether Trump was pursuing a business deal – now, apparently, an established fact – but whether doing so provided Russia with potential leverage for a senior political figure, which it plainly did.
Commenting on Cohen’s plea deal, a New York Times editorial concluded that it showed “that Mr. Trump’s mind never strayed far from his business dealings and how to further enrich himself and his family, even as he was campaigning for the nation’s highest office.” It could have added that a large body of public evidence also shows that such behaviour continued after Mr Trump took office, violating the emoluments clause and opening the president to further legal complications.
Trump’s decision to remove Attorney General Jeff Sessions and appoint Matthew Whitaker, a loyalist who has openly voiced support for curtailing the Mueller investigation has complicated the political chess game that is being played out in America’s courts. Although Whitaker retains oversight of the special prosecutor, court filings such as the Cohen plea deal allow the investigation to reveal the substance of its findings ahead of a final report. This is significant for several reasons, not least because it makes oversight far less consequential than the president would have liked, and it redoubles pressure on the White House to cooperate with the special prosecutor.
Last year Trump told the Times that Mueller risked crossing a “red line” if he delved into the Trump Organization’s business dealings. Clearly that line has been crossed. But it is difficult to see how Trump can push back against the investigation without embroiling himself even further in legal and political trouble. The long list of his former advisors and associates who face serious legal trouble – Cohen, Flynn, Gates, Manafort and Papadopoulos – will likely increase when the Democrats use their new found subpoena powers in a few weeks.
Cohen’s plea not only deepens the impression that Trump worked with a rogues gallery of unsavoury operatives throughout his 2016 campaign, it places him even closer to being the “unindicted co-conspirator” in their legal woes, in the infamous Watergate phrase. In this context it is significant that Cohen’s latest plea follows earlier guilty pleas to eight federal felonies – among them bank and tax fraud and campaign-finance violations – crimes that have already sunk his legal career and exposed him to long jail sentences. The new admission of guilt, which was made in a surprise court appearance that caught the US media off-guard, suggests that Cohen is searching for a way out of his increasingly Byzantine legal troubles and that Robert Mueller is now closer than ever to placing President Trump under the shadow of impeachment.
