By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
At 10 A.M. on Wednesday—10 P.M. in Hanoi, Vietnam—Michael Cohen will testify before the House Oversight Committee that Donald Trump is a racist, a liar, and a cheat. As my colleague Emily Jane Fox reports, Cohen will also accuse the president of criminal misconduct while in office. Democratic lawmakers say it will be a hearing for the ages. The G.O.P., meanwhile, is already ramping up a scorched-earth campaign to destroy Cohen’s reputation, turn him into a pariah in all quarters, and in the case of one Republican congressman, destroy his marriage. “Hey @MichaelCohen212 – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends?” tweeted Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, flirting with witness tampering. “She’s about to learn a lot…”
Other Republicans have piled on to discredit Cohen’s potentially “earth-shattering” testimony. Fox News’s Alex Pappas got the full rundown from the R.N.C. itself, which has spent days booking its surrogates on cable news, preparing e-mail blasts to reporters, and disseminating talking points to call Cohen’s honesty and integrity into question. “Convicted felon Michael Cohen is going to prison for lying, including lies he told under oath to Congress,” party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel (née Romney) told Fox News. “This whole charade is not about truth, it is a last ditch effort to save face and cast blame on everyone but himself for his crimes.” The package also included a cheeky supercut of various Cohen TV appearances in which he effusively praised Trump, followed by: “Have fun in prison!”
In a joint op-ed published in USA Today, Republican Congressmen Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows previewed another prong of the G.O.P.’s strategy, claiming Democrats were “roll[ing] out the red carpet” for someone who recently pleaded guilty to lying before Congress. “Many of them no doubt hope Cohen will sling enough mud to justify beginning the process of impeaching the president,” they wrote of their Democratic colleagues. “Giving Cohen a congressional platform is a disservice to the public, an affront to our democratic values and flat-out offensive to anyone who seeks the truth.” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, too, sent out a scathing statement calling it “laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”
The G.O.P. has good reason to take the path of total reputation-destruction when it comes to Cohen. This will be the first time that Democrats have control of a public Trump-investigation-related hearing, and Cohen reportedly plans to spill everything he knows about Trump’s actions, including the Stormy Daniels hush payments and efforts to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. Thus the no-holds-barred approach from people like Gaetz, who back in 2017 reportedly made it his personal mission to launch an offensive against any implication of presidential wrongdoing. “No,” he insisted when the Daily Beast asked whether his tweet could constitute witness intimidation. “It is challenging the veracity and character of a witness. We do it every day. We typically do it during people’s testimony. This is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas.” When pressed, in the true spirit of the president, he doubled down:
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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