David Corn new article on the Cohen testimony: The issue is not collusion--it's aiding and abetting.

How Cohen’s Testimony Backs Up the Case That Trump Helped Russia Attack the 2016 Election
The issue is not collusion—it’s aiding and abetting.
DAVID CORNFEBRUARY 27, 2019 4:24 PM

Perhaps the most significant—and overlooked—aspect of the Trump-Russia scandal is that Donald Trump and his crew aided and abetted the Russian attack on the 2016 election by repeatedly denying or downplaying the clandestine Russian intervention aimed at assisting the president. Put aside the issue of direct collusion—say, Trump huddling with Russian President Vladimir Putin to figure out what Democratic emails to hack—the public record already establishes that Trump and his gang are guilty of echoing and reinforcing the Kremlin’s we-didn’t-do-it disinformation efforts, even after they had information indicating Moscow was covertly intervening. In that way, Trump helped Putin’s covert assault—an act of brazen information warfare—against the United States. And Michael Cohen’s historic and dramatic congressional testimony on Wednesday yielded new leads in this regard.

It’s already been demonstrated that Trump and his lieutenants possessed private knowledge that the Kremlin wanted to secretly assist the Trump effort during the campaign. In early June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner—Trump’s top three campaign advisers—met in Trump Tower with a Russian emissary after being told she would deliver them dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a Moscow plot to help Trump. Two months later, Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, received a briefing from the US intelligence community in which he was told US analysts had concluded Moscow was behind the hack-and-dump attacks targeting Democrats. And from mid-June on, there were many media reports noting that cybersecurity experts and US intelligence agencies had fingered Russia as the culprit in the cyber break-in of the Democratic National Committee.

Yet throughout the campaign, the Trump team consistently declared in public that there was no reason to blame the Kremlin. (These denials prompted other Republicans, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, to say little or nothing about the Russian attack.) Cohen’s testimony offered further reason to believe that Trump knew—or should have known—he was lying when he said Russia was not attacking the US election.

..............

Throughout the hearing, Republican members of the committee, who fixated on discrediting Cohen, showed not a scintilla of concern that during the 2016 campaign Trump misled the public about both the Russian attack and his own private dealing in Russia. And Trump defenders will certainly latch onto Cohen’s assertion that he witnessed no clear evidence of direct collusion. But Cohen, who repeatedly acknowledged he had previously lied to Congress, offered testimony that buttressed a core component of the Trump-Russia scandal: Trump helped Putin’s cover-up. And that’s a crucial part of the story that should not be allowed to get lost.


MORE:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/how-cohens-testimony-backs-up-the-case-that-trump-helped-russia-attack-the-2016-election/