FEBRUARY 27, 2019 / 7:03 PM / CBS NEWS

... "He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat," Cohen said. "He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn't a 'sh**hole.' This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States. While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. And, he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid" ...

Cohen provided new details about the catch-and-kill hush payments Cohen made to women on Mr. Trump's behalf. Cohen alleged that he was reimbursed directly by the president through the first year of his term, and he submitted a copy of a personal check for $35,000, signed by Mr. Trump, that he said was one of 11 installments he received as a covert reimbursement of the payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with him over a decade ago ...

"I was in Mr. Trump's office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone," Mr. Cohen said. "Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign" ...

"Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it," Cohen said. "He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project. And so I lied about it, too -- because Mr. Trump had made clear to me, through his personal statements to me that we both knew were false and through his lies to the country, that he wanted me to lie" ...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michael-cohen-testimony-top-moments-from-ex-trump-attorneys-hearing-before-congress-today-2019-02-27/

it also came out that Trump's tax returns were NOT under audit?

By Elie Honig
Updated 7:40 PM ET, Wed February 27, 2019

(CNN)When I used to prosecute Mafia cases, trials often reached a dramatic climax when the star cooperating witness took the stand to testify against his former boss. In one memorable trial moment, as my cooperating witness testified against his former boss, the boss mouthed, "I'll kill you."

The cooperator responded from the witness stand, "You got something to say to me?" -- to which the boss screamed from the defense table, "You're a punk! You're a dog! You're a dog! You always were a dog your whole life, you punk dog!" The US Marshals had to restore order in the courtroom before we could finish the cooperator's testimony.

When Michael Cohen testified publicly in the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, we did not see death threats or profane screaming matches. But the public did see the classic cooperator dynamic in play: One man swears to what the other vehemently denies, feelings of betrayal and mutual resentment boil to the surface and the stakes are at an all-time high.

After Cohen's testimony, many readers asked: As a former prosecutor, did you find his testimony credible? I did. Cohen, like all cooperating witnesses, is a flawed person and witness. But the question is not whether a cooperator is likeable; it is whether they can be believed. And prosecutors assess believability by examining corroboration -- external, independent evidence that supports (or undermines) the cooperator's testimony ...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/27/opinions/cross-exam-not-just-cohen-implicate-trump-honig/index.html

Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker and Michael R. Sisak
Associated Press

... Cohen, shaking off incessant criticism from Republicans anxious to paint him as a felon and liar, became the first Trump insider to pull back the curtain on a version of the inner workings of Trump's political and business operations. He likened the president to a "mobster" who demanded blind loyalty from underlings and expected them to lie on his behalf to conceal information and protect him — even if it meant breaking the law ...

"My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything: my family's happiness, friendships, my law license, my company, my livelihood, my honor, my reputation, and soon my freedom," Cohen said. "I will not sit back say nothing and allow him to do the same to the country" ...

As Republicans blasted him as a convicted liar, a mostly unrattled Cohen sought to blunt the attacks by repeatedly acknowledging his own failings. He called himself a "fool," warned lawmakers of the perils of blind loyalty to a leader undeserving of it and pronounced himself ashamed of what he'd done to protect Trump ...

"He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election," Cohen said. "The campaign — for him — was always a marketing opportunity" ...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-michael-cohen-congress-testimony-20190226-story.html

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 6:45 PM ET, Wed February 27, 2019

... "Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign" ...

... "He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair, and to lie to his wife about it, which I did" ...

Cohen offered more details on his conversations with members of the Trump family about the project in Moscow; he said that he briefed the President's eldest son and daughter an estimated 10 times about the project ...

In October 2016, when an audio tape emerged of Trump using lewd and misogynistic language, Trump adviser -- and later White House communications director -- Hope Hicks called Cohen, who was in London visiting his daughter, to make clear that he was expected to bat down this story as nothing more than "locker room talk" ...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/27/politics/michael-cohen-testimony-lessons/index.html

... In his closing statements, Cohen said he had owned up to his mistakes, but that "silence and complicity" would not be among them.

"I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power," Cohen said of Mr Trump.

He slammed the President's rhetoric against veterans, the media and his decision to shut down the Government before Christmas and New Year to appease his base.

"This behaviour is churlish, it denigrates the office of the President, and it's simply un-American," he said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-28/donald-trumps-former-lawyer-michael-cohen-testifies/10855572

Everything else is just extra sauce.

... "I remember being in the room with Mr Trump, probably in early June 2016, when something peculiar happened. Don Jr came into the room and walked behind his father's desk — which in itself was unusual.

"I recalled Don Jr leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying: "The meeting is all set." I remember Mr Trump saying, "OK good ... let me know".

Cohen said Mr Trump Jr would "never" set up a meeting of any significance without checking with his father first.

Mr Trump has denied he was aware of his son's meeting with the Kremlin-connected lawyer ...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/michael-cohen-calls-donald-trump-a-racist-in-testimony/10854646

Richard Wolffe

Donald Trump has done some strange things to the Republican party. Gone is their disgust at Stalinist tyrants from North Korea. Vanished is their outrage at deficit spending. Evaporated is their horror at a president who ignores Congress and the constitution ...

Trump’s loyalists in the House seemed to think that was the end of the story. Who could believe a proven liar like Michael Cohen? The only snag is that he was lying on behalf of his client, one Donald Trump. So the more they talked about his lies, the more he talked about his lying client ...

The hapless Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, took a swing at Cohen but ended up falling off his stool. “Let’s go back at this credibility,” he bumbled after questioning Cohen’s legal credentials. “You want us to make sure that we think of you as a real philanthropic icon, that you’re about justice that you’re the person that someone would call at three in the morning. No, they wouldn’t. Not at all…You’re a pathological liar. You don’t know truth from falsehood.”

“Sir, I’m sorry,” said Cohen. “Are you referring to me or the president?” ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/27/loyalty-trump-cost-michael-cohen-republicans

By Karen Tumulty
Columnist
February 27 at 6:38 PM

... “Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation — only to market himself and to build his wealth and power,” Michael Cohen told the House Oversight Committee. “Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’?”

In other words, what we have been living through for the past two years has been an alternate reality. It is far different from the one Trump envisioned when he came down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015 and announced what was pretty much universally regarded as a preposterous bid for the presidency ...

If the whole exercise of running for president was a pretense, just another reality show, then the lying and ma­nipu­la­tion required to pull it off might have seemed, as Cohen claimed, “trivial.” So Cohen made hush payments to women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs, lodged threats of legal action to keep Trump’s presumably embarrassing academic record a secret and fibbed about the possibly nonexistent bone spurs that kept his client from being drafted to fight in Vietnam.

Still, for this con to work to Trump’s benefit in the long run, he would have to create a second-season plot line that would preserve his relevance after he lost the election. And that meant damaging the legitimacy of the person whom even Trump assumed would win it ....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-revealing-insight-of-michael-cohens-testimony/2019/02/27/2e5a6402-3aaa-11e9-a06c-3ec8ed509d15_story.html?utm_term=.b90ac604a750

John Gotti should have been acquitted because Sammy the bull was a horrible person.

Fortunately that’s not really the way it works.

Julia Reinstein
Nidhi Prakash
Lissandra Villa

... Republicans presented Lynne Patton, a black official in the Trump administration, .. as evidence that the president can’t be racist ...

... Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a freshman Democrat from Michigan, called Meadows out, saying it was racist that a black woman would be used as a “prop” ...

Meadows, a Republican, became extremely angry at Tlaib’s remark, at one point getting red in the face. He also asked that her remarks be stricken from the record.

In response, Tlaib read back her statement, adding that she was not personally calling Meadows a racist, only pointing out that it was “a racist act” ...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/michael-cohen-hearing-mark-meadows-rashida-tlaibist-argument

By Brett Arends
Published: Feb 27, 2019 4:48 p.m. ET

... If you’re running for president, and you want to make a hush money payment to a porn star, it’s probably unwise to pay by check.

“The two were very stupid,” said Alex Ozols, a defense attorney in San Diego, referring to Cohen and Trump. “When Trump wrote the check he obviously wasn’t thinking long-term and of the consequences... Cash is essentially untraceable.”

“Obviously, by writing a check for a dubious payment, one is leaving a paper trail,” said Chicago attorney Nancy DePodesta at Saul, Ewing, Arnstein & Lehr. “People (frequently) pay in cash or services, for this exact reason.” DePodesta, who was a federal prosecutor for 12 years, says checks and other proof of financial transactions were often gold dust for investigators. “We’d follow the money,” she says ...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-stupid-trump-mistake-that-led-to-the-michael-cohen-hearings-2019-02-27

Ken White
Attorney and former federal prosecutor

... House Republicans needed a trial lawyer — or even a moderately bright junior-high mock-trial participant — to tell them how to do anything. Cross-examination is hard. It’s not just barking at the witness. It takes meticulous planning and patience. Republicans could have marshaled Cohen’s many sins of the past to undermine his statements today. Instead they returned repeatedly to lies and misdeeds he’d already admitted, wallowed in silly trivialities like the “Women for Cohen” Twitter account, and yelled. The effect was to make an unsympathetic man modestly more sympathetic. Republicans committed the classic cross-examination blunder: They gave the witness the opportunity to further explain his harmful direct testimony. They provided Cohen with one slow pitch up the middle after another, letting him repeat the cooperating witness’s go-to explanation like a mantra: I did these bad things so often and so long because that’s what it took to work for your guy. I have seldom seen a cross-examination go worse ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/michael-cohens-gop-cross-examiners-failed-miserably/583777/

By Dana Milbank
Columnist
February 27 at 7:57 PM

... Cohen’s testimony put the committee’s Republicans in an unusual position: After two years of defending or ignoring Trump’s lies, they professed newfound fondness for truth ...

For hours, they disparaged Cohen for doing what they excuse from his old boss: threatening people, caring only about himself and vaingloriously portraying himself as a “sexy,” “handsome” and “honest guy.”

With his classic New York accent, Cohen deflected, just as his boss taught him. When Jordan demanded to know why Cohen didn’t set the record straight after a false media report, Cohen replied: “The president has told something over 9,000 lies to date. .?.?. Do I go on television in an effort to correct his mistakes?” ...

... one thing rang true in his testimony, because so many have been ruined similarly by service to Trump. “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you are doing now for 10 years: I protected Mr. Trump,” Cohen told Republicans. “I can only warn people: The more people who follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clearly-michael-cohen-learned-from-the-best/2019/02/27/e21cbb9c-3add-11e9-aaae-69364b2ed137_story.html?utm_term=.3327c1daac15

DAVID A. GRAHAM
8:14 PM ET

... Not only was the man who grabbed the spotlight Michael Cohen, whom Trump has called a “rat.” All the more upsettingly for the president, it happened while he was out of the country, at a summit in Vietnam, and in the middle of the night his time. Throughout the day on Wednesday, Cohen held the media’s attention, and he did it to great effect—creating new problems for Trump on multiple fronts.

Most of the damage came from Cohen’s prepared opening remarks, which leaked to the press over night. Cohen, who worked for more than a decade for Trump in an all-purpose “fixer” role, made a series of big claims. The public already knew the broad outlines of the hush-money agreements under which Cohen paid women who alleged they had sexual affairs with Trump, but Cohen offered new details. Notably, he testified that Trump made reimbursement payments to him since taking office, which would represent a crime. And Cohen brought a Trump check to prove it ...

One of the most effective questioners was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who asked a concise and effective series of inquiries toward the end of the session. Under Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning, Cohen said that Trump had submitted inflated estimates of his assets to insurance companies, which could constitute fraud. He also told her that Trump had deflated the value of properties to lower his tax bill ...

When Trump loses control of messaging, it sometimes has dangerous results. If he feels marginalized, the president will often act more outrageously. That has great risks, especially with Trump in the high-stakes setting of his summit with Kim, where he might be tempted to reach for a dramatic gesture. Cohen’s testimony not only spotlighted some of Trump’s biggest exposures to scandal, but it also showed how tenuous his grasp of the national conversation can be.