A really big “if”
On Thursday night, both NBC and CNN reported that Cohen, per a source close to him, was prepared to tell investigators that he was present when Trump Jr. told his father about the possibility of meeting with the Russian lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The publicist offered Junior dirt on Clinton, Junior said he loved it and needed to talk to the publicist’s client Agalarov.
Three days later, Trump Jr. and Agalarov spoke (a call Trump Jr. claimed not to remember but that Agalarov did). Call logs suggest that Agalarov called Trump Jr. at 4:04 p.m. on June 6 and that they spoke for a minute or two. About 20 minutes later, Trump Jr. received a call from a blocked number, after which he immediately called Agalarov back. The call lasted three minutes, and, the next morning, the meeting was set up (after Trump Jr. placed calls to both campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the other two meeting attendees — calls Trump Jr. says he didn’t remember).
The same evening as the calls to Agalarov, after Trump won several Republican primary contests, he gave a victory speech.
“I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week, and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” he said during the speech. “I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend, who knows.”
He didn’t give that speech; the dirt turned out to be not very interesting dirt.
There are still question marks.
Was Cohen with Trump when the then-candidate called his son and was told about the Russia meeting? Did he find out some other way? Is the presentation from that source close to Cohen accurate? (Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, now on Trump’s legal team, says Cohen is lying.) More broadly — and more subject to interpretation — is the key question: What does this tell us about Trump’s relationship with Russia before the election?
The bad news for Trump is that, so far, the safe bet has consistently been to assume that the Trump Tower situation is more incriminating than Trump’s team would have you believe. The revelations on Thursday further bolster that idea.
If true, Cohen’s account would put Trump front and center in a plan to conspire — collude, if you will — with Russians to help him win the presidency. This almost certainly would make Trump’s mantra of “no collusion” a baldfaced lie and his conduct over the past 18 months (e.g. denying knowledge of the meeting, writing a phony account of the meeting, badgering Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself, threatening the special prosecutor, firing James B. Comey as FBI director, concocting bizarre and false conspiracy theories to distract investigators) nothing short of obstruction of justice. But that is a really big “if.”
Trump barfed out a loony tunes tweet this morning screaming “I NEVER DID” but then he lies about everything so who cares.
…..I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr. Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2018
Rubin continues:
Interestingly, Trump’s TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani didn’t deny the allegations Thursday night; he simply attacked Cohen’s credibility. Giuliani’s defense that Cohen is a “pathological liar” raises the question as to why the president would employ such a scoundrel for years. Moreover, given that Trump has told thousands of lies as president and that the large majority of Americans think Trump is dishonest, he’s not in a particularly strong position to get into a credibility contest with Cohen.
…
[I]f Trump’s direct approval of cooperation with Russians can be proved, it will be the biggest political scandal in American history. His presidency for all intents and purposes would be delegitimized. We are talking about a presidential candidate who sought and received help from a hostile foreign power, covered it up and “repaid” the favor by public obsequiousness to that power’s leader. Again, this has yet to be proved.
And so we await developments.
Frankly, I will be shocked if the allegations are not true. It’s just so very Trumpesque to game the system however he can; only a simpleton would suppose that he wouldn’t do so, given the chance, or that a man who micromanages everything even to the point of obsessively haranguing for months or years would not know about such a meeting between his own son/advisors in his own building.