Slam Dunk

WaPo paraphrased-

Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.): If Unidicted Co-Conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio tried to coach somebody not to testify, or testify falsely, would that be a crime?

Attorney General Nominee William P. Barr: Yes.

Slam Dunk. Of course it has been since the Lester Holt interview after Comey’s firing where he said this–

Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it

And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.

And when he told the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak this

I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job, I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off. I’m not under investigation.

Today the buzz (hah, I am sooo punny) is about this-

President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project
by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, BuzzFeed News
January 17, 2019

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.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.
…
(T)he 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.

But Cohen’s testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.
…
A spokesperson for the Office of Special Counsel declined to comment.

Cohen also declined comment — but the law enforcement sources familiar with his testimony to the special counsel said he had confirmed that Trump directed him to lie to Congress, and also that he had provided details of his conversations about the project with the president and Ivanka and Donald Jr.

Those three members of the Trump family have distanced themselves from the Moscow project, saying that they had little knowledge of the negotiations. But a picture of their deep involvement is now emerging, as FBI agents and prosecutors pore over witness interviews and internal documents from Cohen and other Trump Organization officials and executives.

Trump was even made aware that Cohen was speaking to Russian government officials about the deal. The lawyer at one point spoke to a Kremlin aide as he sought support for the tower.

Trump also encouraged Cohen to plan a trip to Russia during the campaign, where the candidate could meet face-to-face with Putin.
…
Ivanka Trump was slated to manage a spa at the tower and personally recommended an architect. She also instructed Cohen to speak with a Russian athlete who offered “synergy on a government level” to get the Moscow project off the ground, in another aspect of the deal first revealed by BuzzFeed News that later was affirmed by the special counsel’s sentencing memo. Cohen rebuffed the athlete’s proposal, which angered Ivanka Trump, according to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump’s attorney wrote that she was only “minimally involved” in the project. “Ms. Trump did not know about this proposal until after a non-binding letter of intent had been signed, never talked to anyone outside the Organization about the proposal, never visited the prospective project site and, even internally, was only minimally involved,” wrote Peter Mirijanian.

Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 7, 2017, that he was only “peripherally aware” of the plan to build a tower in Moscow. “Most of my knowledge has been gained since as it relates to hearing about it over the last few weeks.”

The two law enforcement sources disputed this characterization and said that he and Cohen had multiple, detailed conversations on this subject during the campaign.

Cohen will testify publicly before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Feb. 7.

There was immediate reaction-

And more considered reaction-

Mueller might finally have a smoking gun
By Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
January 18, 2019

President Trump once joked that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and still retain the support of his base. That proposition may soon be tested.
…
No one has a real understanding of “collusion,” because it is a non-legal, vague term. A conspiracy can be complicated, hard to prove. “Suborning perjury,” a phrase known to anyone who’s watched “Law & Order,” is specific and simple.

In this case, if the report is accurate, the charge of suborning perjury would not rest merely on former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s testimony. (“BuzzFeed says that Mueller’s office has more evidence than just Cohen’s testimony that Trump directed him to lie to Congress. Per the report, Cohen’s testimony is backed up by ‘interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.’”) Trump’s hapless TV attorney Rudy Giuliani can smear Cohen all he likes; multiple witnesses and documents are not so easily dismissed. Moreover, one has to wonder if this conversation — like the discussion about former Playboy model Karen McDougal — was taped.
…
The question then is not if such action was illegal, or if it is impeachable, but if it can be proved. None other than Graham told us in the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings in the House that we simply cannot allow a perjurer to remain in office:

The assertion that Senate Republicans would never break with Trump and never vote to impeach has rested primarily on the assumption that the evidence would never be so conclusive and the crime would never be so serious that senators would lack excuses to avoid conviction. All of that goes out the window if multiple pieces of evidence demonstrate Trump suborned perjury. At that point, public opinion may present Republicans with a choice: Get Trump out of office now, or we’ll vote all of you out in 2020.

I think Bill Clinton didn’t even commit perjury much less suborn it. ‘Is’ can mean a variety of things depending on context, it is the dialectal present tense first-person and third-person singular of ‘to be’ and one of the most common words in the English language (‘the’ #1, ‘a’ #2).

But you you know, consensual sodomy albeit with a super creepy power dynamic is faaar more important than TREASON!