Cohen's lawyer says senators failed to ask the right 'follow-up questions' in collusion probe

Source: Yahoo News



Michael Isikoff Chief Investigative Correspondent, Yahoo News•August 24, 2018

Michael Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis says that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to ask the right “follow-up questions” when his client appeared before the panel last year and therefore failed to elicit crucial answers about President Trump’s prior knowledge of Russian hacking of Democratic emails during the 2016 election.

Davis was questioned on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery” about Cohen’s testimony to the Senate intelligence panel last September in which Cohen testified, in a prepared statement: “I never saw anything — not a hint of anything — that demonstrated [President Trump’s] involvement in Russian interference in our election or any form of Russian collusion.” But Davis, in multiple television appearances this week, gave an apparently conflicting account, suggesting that Cohen has information he is now prepared to tell special counsel Robert Mueller about Trump’s prior knowledge of the hacking.

“Was he telling the truth?” Davis was asked during the “Skullduggery” interview about Cohen’s previous testimony to the Senate. “He was telling the truth, but there’s a problem in some of the words used there,” Davis replied.

Davis then replied that the senators failed to ask the right follow-ups to Cohen’s prepared statement — about Trump’s “level of awareness” of the hacking, seeming to draw a distinction between awareness and “involvement.”

“If he were asked, ‘Were you aware of Mr. Trump’s level of awareness before the hacking illegally done by a foreign government? Were you aware that Mr. Trump might have known and didn’t call the FBI?’ I don’t think you would’ve gotten the answer that you just read. But that question wasn’t asked.”


Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/cohens-lawyer-says-senators-failed-ask-right-follow-questions-collusion-probe-090053262.html