Buzzfeed put the match to this firestorm by reporting on Thursday:
President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.
The story was followed by a display of tap-dancing specificity and legalese put out by Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr:
So, what do we have here?
Is BuzzFeed or their law enforcement sources dead wrong? Maybe they’re just partially wrong.
If the Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) wanted to swat down the entirety of the story, they would have. Their dedication to accuracy is legendary. The SCO didn’t slap BuzzFeed down “with extreme prejudice”...but nudged them with exquisite delicacy.
Meanwhile, at BuzzFeed (and they’ve been out ahead by months on some administration scandals they’ve broken) they still stand by their reporting and request the SCO to “make clearer” their objections.
What’s going on?
Could the SCO be signaling that BuzzFeed was on the right track, but just took the wrong turn?
The objection from the SCO to BuzzFeed is curious in some ways. The SCO does not simply say the report is false, nor do they use a word like “misleading.” The language they employ is carefully couched in enough legal jargon to lend obfuscation to understanding exactly what SCO is contesting.
As careful as SCO is in saying BuzzFeed erred in their statement descriptions and document and testimony characterization, they are just as careful in not saying that BuzzFeed is entirely off the mark.
Does the SCO want to correct BuzzFeed for leaping from what their two sources in law enforcement actually told them to “Trump told Cohen, directly” to lie to Congress?
Perhaps what BuzzFeed didn’t quite suss out from their LE sources leak was the subtly that Cohen was told to lie to Congress, he did so at what he understood to be Trump’s behest, but it was not Trump himself that spoke to Cohen.
According to the BuzzFeed article that started this:
“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. 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 [law enforcement] 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.”
Maybe it’s the phrase “president personally instructed” that is what we’re getting hung up on here.
It could indeed have been what Trump ordered Cohen to do. As Cohen has told us, nothing happens in any Trump organization that Donald doesn’t green-light.
Are we dancing around in a game of “telephone” between the law enforcement sources, BuzzFeed, and Mueller’s office where some of the minutiae of the scheme got lost in translation? Could the confusion be BuzzFeed missed a data point: the go-between for the order from Trump to Cohen?
A go-between that did the work of getting everyone on-board and keeping their stories straight. A someone who was clever enough to create a fictitious parallel past everyone was told to stick to; where there occurred no conspiracy, no obstruction of justice, no campaign finance shenanigans.
That job requires the kind of "someone" who had the ability to create a seamless story with made-up dates, places, and plot synopses. And in creating this alternate felony-free reality, this "someone" has to be savvy enough to not make any mistakes that would be apparent in a cursory comparison of Congressional testimonies.
"Someone" (or several someones) who were smart, legal- and detail-oriented who created and handed out the scripts for lying to Congress.
That’s not Donald Trump.
But what if that someone was given a general order to get everyone on the same page and tell them to lie to Congress by “someone higher than themselves?”
In this scenario, that “higher-up someone” may very well have been Donald Trump, and Mueller’s strategy might look something like this:
Charged: Cohen with perjury → Yet to Charge: Unsub go-between that suborned Cohen’s perjury before Congress to protect Trump → Yet to Charge: Trump for ordering go-between to suborn perjury from Congressional witnesses.
That type of thread would still lead to Trump, but getting all the legal minutia excruciatingly right is very important. This might be why the SCO pulled BuzzFeed up short for their “inaccurate” conclusion by “mischaracterizing” their source information. This might be what that very carefully worded Mueller statement is about.
Mueller did go way out of his way to drag Cohen back into court, just to charge him with that lone felony: lying to Congress, for a good reason. Mueller even asked the court to consider adding no extra time to Cohen’s sentence for this charge, yet did go to all that trouble. Mueller must have found that record of perjury valuable. It does make you wonder.
Perhaps Mueller is going for a bigger target and has already flipped Cohen in the specific matter of who told him to lying to Congress to help the president. And the SCO will need to charge that target go-between before he can name and charge the target at the top.
Moreover, this administration is a target-rich environment.
There are a lot of possible joint-fittings for a pipeline between Trump and the minions, e.g., Don Jr., administration officials Jarvanka, even some who have left like Hope Hicks, or someone else Trump used or uses for delegating down his orders.
Establishing the charge with Cohen was important. You cannot charge someone for suborning perjury unless you’ve established someone committed perjury. It seems like someone suborned his perjury.
Perhaps the part that Buzzfeed didn’t pick up on is that all this tip-toeing and side-stepping you see is that the word didn't go directly from Trump’s mouth to Cohen’s ear. Mayhaps there was a middle-man. A go-between.
But if a go-between is identified, and if they were to testify that Trump told them to tell a lot of people to go and lie to Congress under oath re. the Moscow Tower project, et. al. we will arrive at Individual 1 again.
Maybe BuzzFeed is virtually there with their story, but they’re just missing a felon-in-the-middle.
If there was a go-between...who might that be?
Donald Jr. might (again) be a wee bit premature and may yet have to eat 🤢 this tweet:
But for neat tweets in this entire matter of what/who/where/when & why, I’ll go with David Corn: