Michael Flynn isn’t the only person with a lawyer refusing to share documents with Congress.
Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, said on Tuesday that he was refusing to cooperate with House and Senate intelligence committee investigations into Russian election meddling. The move may prompt lawmakers to issue subpoenas, compelling him to provide documents, testimony or other records.
Why did Cohen refuse? Was it a claim of attorney-client privilege, a declaration of executive privilege, or a studied decision to protect himself by insisting on Fifth Amendment rights? None of the above.
Mr. Cohen, a confidant of Mr. Trump who was also a spokesman during the campaign, called the requests “poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered.”
Refusal to cooperate with the Congress by declaration of grammatical insufficiency would seem to carve out some new legal ground. But Cohen certainly has the Trump regime’s theory of “attack the investigation by showing that it hadn’t finished before it started” down pat.
“To date, there has not been a single witness, document or piece of evidence linking me to this fake Russian conspiracy,” he said in a text message. “This is not surprising to me because there is none!”
Michael Cohen has been Trump’s personal attorney for several years, was previous president of Trump Entertainment, and lives in a Trump building. Does it show?
In addition to being Trump’s personal attorney, Cohen has his own back channel to Russia, along with everyone’s favorite former National Security Advisor.
A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.
Who crafted this document that they then ran by Flynn? Michael Cohen. Cohen also delivered the document.
The plan for lifting sanctions against Russia was part of a scheme put together by Cohen, Russian-American mobster and penny-stock fraudster Felix Sater, and a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker from the political movement put together by, of course, Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort.
Cohen doesn’t need to produce any documents to tie himself to the Trump–Russia investigation, because he already wrote that document, personally, and dropped it on the desk of Michael Flynn.
From back in February:
Mr. Cohen is one of several Trump associates under scrutiny in an F.B.I. counterintelligence examination of links with Russia, according to law enforcement officials; he has denied any illicit connections.
Flynn, Manafort, Sater, and pro-Putin forces in the Ukraine—and Cohen acting as the coordinator and secretary for them all. That’s just one of Michael Cohen’s actions that make the investigation into his connections anything but fake.
