Opinion: The huge disconnect at the core of the GOP defense of Trump
By Greg Sargent Greg Sargent Opinion writer covering national politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer February 27 at 4:16 PM There’s a strange, gaping disconnect at the core of the Republican performance at the ongoing congressional hearing about Michael Cohen and President Trump.
After all, by their own lights, you can’t believe anything Cohen says. And this is the best — and probably only — chance they’ll have to go one-on-one with Cohen. So why not grab on to this unique chance to demonstrate for the whole world to see that Cohen’s many allegations also can’t be believed? Consider some of the big revelations of the day. Cohen alleged that he overheard Trump on a phone call with Roger Stone, who gave him a heads-up on a coming Wikileaks email dump. At the hearing, Cohen elaborated, claiming he’d overheard this conversation on speaker phone. He even said that he believed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III may have corroborating information about this.
Republicans also spent very little time pressing Cohen on a claim that you might think he’d actually be very vulnerable on: The assertion that Trump communicated to him that he should lie about the Moscow project without saying so. This is a hard claim to defend on its face, so you’d think Republicans would be all over it. But they weren’t, at least not much.
We should never get so jaded and desensitized that we stop being shocked that Republicans are all in, almost to a member, on the mafioso president. Not a single one of them has reached the end of the line. To the contrary, they’re escalating their efforts to coverup for him. This is why Republicans were forced to resort to their other play of the day, claiming that the fact that the hearing is taking place at all is a travesty of justice because, after all — and note the boomerang logic here — Cohen is, of course, a proven serial liar, so why are we wasting time hearing from him at all? Needless to say, Republicans couldn’t treat this hearing as an opportunity to shed more light on what he’s actually claiming.
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