Michelle Cottle

<h1>If you thought the past two years of inquiries into possible misbehavior by Trumpworld were brutal, brace yourself. Phase 2 is about to heat up.</h1>

On Monday, the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee announced a wide-ranging inquiry into “the alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates and members of his administration.”

Citing two years of “near-daily attacks on our basic legal, ethical and constitutional rules and norms” by the president, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee’s chairman, asserted that, while it was important to respect the continuing criminal investigations, Congress “cannot rely on others to do the investigative work for us.” With Republican lawmakers having abdicated their oversight duties when they controlled the House, Nadler said, Democrats must now “begin building the public record.”

As its opening move, Nadler’s committee has sent requests for documents to 81 individuals and entities associated with Donald Trump, including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Hope Hicks, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. The now-defunct Trump Foundation is on the list, as is the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign, the White House and the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee. Also, David Pecker, the president’s close friend and chairman of the parent company of The National Enquirer.

Look for the next several months to be a nonstop pageant of subpoenas, hearings and court challenges.

Nadler’s panel is not alone in looking to impose accountability on a devious and dishonest president. But his investigation is special in at least one regard. As students of Congress — or of presidential scandals — can tell you, the House Judiciary Committee is where impeachment proceedings are born. And the areas on which Nadler will focus — obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuse of power — are precisely the sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors on which such cases are built.

Not that Nadler is raring to impeach. Many Democrats worry that an attempt to remove the president could prompt a political backlash, and no one wants to repeat what happened in 1998, when House Republicans’ obsessive pursuit of President Bill Clinton contributed to the party taking an electoral beating.

Even as he prepared to start this investigation, Nadler sought to tamp down expectations. “Impeachment is a long way down the road,” he said Sunday in an ABC News interview.

Political investigations tend to be marathons rather than sprints, requiring the slow, meticulous accretion of evidential layers. It’s easy to forget how slowly and painfully the Watergate investigation unfolded. It was more than a year after John Dean’s congressional testimony that President Richard Nixon resigned. With his investigation, Nadler is looking to build a case for impeachment so compelling that it will have enough bipartisan support to survive the Republican-controlled Senate. Barring that, his investigation will serve to keep the heat on Trump, and perhaps keep the Democratic base at least somewhat placated, as the next election approaches.

Nadler is right to telegraph restraint. This weekend, Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, said of Nadler’s inquiry: “I think Congressman Nadler decided to impeach the president the day the president won the election.”

Trump cavalierly dismissed the sweeping document request at a White House luncheon with the North Dakota State Bison football team Monday. “I cooperate all the time with everybody,” he said. “You know the beautiful thing — no collusion. It’s all a hoax.”

Saturday, in a two-hour speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump offered a more pungent take on his tormentors, using a vulgarity to describe the special counsel inquiry and calling the investigations “collusion delusion.”

But his core message remains the same: The president is perfectly content to burn down the nation to save his own hide.

It is unclear what new crimes or abuses Nadler’s investigation might reveal. No matter how determined, Democrats in Congress lag far behind both the special counsel’s office and the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York. Yet the House still has a vital role to play in educating the public on the legal and ethical questions spiraling around this president.

And there is much to illuminate, despite Trump’s repeated assertion that, absent hard evidence of his having directly colluded with Russia to subvert an American election, he can declare vindication. Just last week, in his testimony about Trump before the House Oversight Committee, Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime fixer and personal lawyer, detailed accusations of sleaziness and potential criminality that included tax fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. Little of what Cohen shared was new, but it was important nonetheless, allowing the public its first opportunity to hear someone with intimate knowledge run through the catalog of the president’s shameless and lawless behavior.

Look for Nadler’s effort to bring many more such brutal spectacles as he seeks to build his case. This is what oversight looks like. It is not for the faint of heart.

This article originally appeared in <a id="81519a05-1935-4b20-801b-2d9da2458c17" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/trump-nadler-obstruction.html">The New York Times</a>.

On Monday, the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee announced a wide-ranging inquiry into “the alleged obstruction of justice, public corruption and other abuses of power by President Trump, his associates and members of his administration.”

Trouble ahead, trouble behind

It was Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who burst forth with this playground taunt of Michael Cohen, the longtime fixer and personal lawyer for President Donald Trump who appeared Wednesday before the House Oversight and Reform Committee to talk about his former boss.

But Gosar’s observation was more than an isolated zinger; it was an encapsulation of his party’s overarching approach to Cohen’s testimony. It also provides a pretty good sense of how few minds the hearing is likely to change in this era of bitter polarization — and how tough it can be to bring any clarity to the swirl of controversies engulfing this president.

As that spectacle was opening in Washington, 12 time zones away, in Hanoi, the president was wrapping up a friendly dinner with Kim Jong Un, the tyrannical leader of North Korea. Trump hopes that the pageantry of peacemaking in Asia will overshadow the damaging testimony of the former confidant he has written off as a lying “rat.”

We await the results of Trump’s and Kim’s negotiations. We hope that they are more edifying than the House hearings.

Oh, and India and Pakistan — both possessed of nuclear weapons — were engaged in escalating hostilities, including the downing of two Indian warplanes on Wednesday.

On Capitol Hill, committee Republicans did not waste their time disputing Cohen’s characterization of Trump as “a racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat.” At one point, Rep. Mark Meadows asked Lynne Patton, an African-American woman who worked for the Trump family as a party planner and now serves in the administration, to stand behind him, citing her as proof that the president cannot possibly be racist. That’s about as substantive as the pushback got.

Instead, Republicans stuck to discrediting and vivisecting the witness. Member after member detailed Cohen’s financial fraud, his tax evasion, his professional disloyalty and, of course, his previous lies to Congress. The committee’s ranking Republican, Jim Jordan — in high-dudgeon and dangerously overcaffeinated — seemed particularly troubled by the origins and authenticity of a Twitter account, Women for Cohen, that pushed out ridiculous flattery about Cohen’s manliness: #sexy! #handsome!

Message: Cohen is a liar, a “swindler,” a narcissist and a felon whom only a fool would listen to. Multiple Republicans, in fact, went on at length about what a disgrace it was that Democrats had provided a platform for such a scoundrel.

While quibbling with details here and there, Cohen did not disagree with the Republicans’ critique. Early and often, he acknowledged he had done some bad things for which he soon would be spending time in prison. He did, however, at one point feel moved to observe to Jordan:

“I just find it interesting, sir, that between yourself and your colleagues, that not one question so far ... has been asked about President Trump. That’s actually why I thought I was coming today.”

Aware of his credibility problems, Cohen showed up with hard proof of Trumpian misdeeds: a personal check from the president, allegedly used to reimburse Cohen for his payment to Stormy Daniels; evidence that Trump arranged to have a portrait of himself purchased at a charity auction by a straw buyer, who was then repaid through Trump’s charitable foundation; and letters that Trump had instructed Cohen to write, warning the president’s high school, colleges and the College Board not to release his grades or test scores without his permission.

Cohen noted that threatening people on Trump’s behalf was an integral part of his job, estimating that, over a decade, he was called upon to do so around 500 times.

The whole dreary spectacle produced only a few fresh tidbits — such as Cohen’s claim that Trump, a year into his term, explicitly directed him to lie about the president’s involvement in the hush-money scheme — none of which seem likely to alter the competing narratives being pushed by the president’s critics and allies. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat’s star freshman, laid the groundwork for demanding the president’s tax returns and issuing future subpoenas to more Trump lackeys. Cohen suggested that federal prosecutors in New York are investigating as-yet-unrevealed Trumpian crimes. He also ominously fretted: “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Cohen said that working for Trump was “intoxicating.” But something has changed. Cohen’s performance is likely the first of many such soul-barings to play out in hearing rooms and courtrooms over coming months.

“I regret the day I said ‘yes’ to Mr. Trump,” he said. “I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="f10d1468-e6a8-4601-ae44-4d8ef1a97399" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/opinion/michael-cohen-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

As that spectacle was opening in Washington, 12 time zones away, in Hanoi, the president was wrapping up a friendly dinner with Kim Jong Un, the tyrannical leader of North Korea.

Regrets, Michael Cohen has a few

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Michelle Cottle

Articles written by the author

Trouble ahead, trouble behind

Regrets, Michael Cohen has a few