It doesn’t get too much more cut and dried than this.
Trump telling Michael Cohen to lie about the Trump Tower project is being touted as a “significant new frontier,” i.e. the first recorded instance of Trump specifically telling a subordinate to lie about his business dealings with Russia, to Congress no less. Buzz Feed News:
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”
Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.
The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
If we can trust William Barr’s legal opinion, the sitting *resident of the United States has committed obstruction of justice. And that is a high crime and misdemeanor. And that should lead to impeachment — or would, in any sane democracy not being actively compromised by the complicity of one major political party.