Wednesday's Michael Cohen Hearing-- Trump's Hidden Tax Returns

Cohen's testimony was riveting. But I was shocked to hear an obviously deranged old woman who slipped by the NPR call filter last night. She was unable to complete a single thought and was either severely drug addicted and/or so intellectually impaired that dialing the phone must have been her biggest accomplishment of the month. All she could say is that Trump is her president and Cohen should be sent to jail. The host took her seriously and questioned her as though she had an IQ above 70, which she clearly didn't. He couldn't get anything out of her before he realized the whole call was a mess. I'm guess she accurately represents 99.9% of the Trump base. The rest are the billionaires.

Late Wednesday, Issie Lapowsky, writing for Wired noted that the efficacy of Cohen's testimony was...in the eye of the beholder. And there are a lot of really dumb beholders in our anti-science/anti-education country. "Cohen," wrote Lapowsky, "is a flawed man with nothing left to lose, charting a path to redemption by finally coming clean about crimes and misdeeds allegedly committed by the president of the United States. Either that, or he’s a cheat and a crook who can’t be trusted, who’s already pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and isn’t above doing it again if it’ll help him land a book deal. These are the two interpretations of Cohen’s hearing before the House Oversight Committee that manifested online Wednesday. As they’ve done so many times before-- during the Benghazi investigation, during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings-- the internet’s tribal factions retreated to their corners over the course of the day to tell utterly opposite stories about the much-anticipated hearings and what they revealed about Cohen and Trump.

On social media and on partisan sites, the conversation split into like-minded echo chambers, with each side parroting the talking points of their party’s members who were sitting in the hearing room. What emerged was a sort of cacophonous bizarro world that would have seemed implausible just a year ago: Conservative pundits and political operatives, including Trump’s own children, worked overtime to discredit a man who spent 10 years as a close confidante to Trump, and until last June, served as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee. Liberals, meanwhile, spent their 240 characters sticking up for and even applauding the humility of a man who’ll head to prison in May for, among other things, lying to Congress to defend Trump and making hush money payments on his behalf.

In a world of divergent media diets and carefully curated filter bubbles, just which story you heard depends mostly on your timeline.

Liberal Twitter woke up Wednesday to an avalanche of stories about Cohen’s core arguments. In his opening testimony, which was reported by several media outlets before the hearing began, Cohen called Trump “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat” who knew as early as July of 2016 that Wikileaks was planning “a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” Cohen stated that, while serving as president, Trump personally signed a check to reimburse Cohen for hush money payments he made to women who said they’d had affairs with Trump, and that Trump once challenged Cohen to name a single country run by a black person that isn’t a “shithole.” In his remarks, Cohen painted Trump as a petty tyrant, who had Cohen threaten a high school to prevent it from leaking the future president's grades and SAT scores and who once enlisted a bidder to buy a portrait of Trump at an auction, only to repay the bidder out of his charity’s funds.



Both voices on the left and mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and Wired seized on these accusations as the focal point of the day. This was, after all, the evidence that Cohen had been called on to present. And, as WIRED contributor Garrett Graff pointed out, despite Cohen’s history of lies, he had come to Congress armed with receipts in the form of checks and other documentation that backed up much of his testimony.

However, you wouldn’t find stories about any of this evidence if you scoured social media circles on the right; you wouldn’t find any questions from Republican committee members about these issues either. Instead, conservative outlets pumped out stories casting doubt on Cohen’s credibility. “Cohen Admits He Can’t Corroborate his Allegations Against Trump,” read one headline in the Daily Caller. “Republican Congratulates Cohen For Being First Witness to Testify Before Congress After Being Convicted of Lying to Congress,” read another. Breitbart’s homepage, meanwhile, led with a story about Debra Messing, John Cusack, and other celebrities exploding with “hot takes” about the hearing. They also ran stories like “Michael Cohen Won’t Deny Plans for Book, Movie Deal Under Oath” and “Trump Campaign Dismisses ‘Convicted Perjurer’ Michael Cohen Testimony.”

Ken White noted for Atlantic readers that the committee's Republican neanderthals failed to destroy Cohen's credibility, committing the classic cross-examination blunder. "House Republicans needed a trial lawyer-- or even a moderately bright junior-high mock-trial participant-- to tell them how to do anything," wrote White. Cross-examination is hard. It’s not just barking at the witness. It takes meticulous planning and patience. Republicans could have marshaled Cohen’s many sins of the past to undermine his statements today. Instead, they returned repeatedly to lies and misdeeds he’s already admitted, wallowed in silly trivialities such as the 'Women for Cohen' Twitter account, and yelled. The effect was to make an unsympathetic man modestly more sympathetic. Republicans committed the classic cross-examination blunder: They gave the witness the opportunity to further explain his harmful direct testimony. They provided Cohen with one slow pitch up the middle after another, letting him repeat the cooperating witness’s go-to explanation like a mantra: I did these bad things so often and so long because that’s what it took to work for your guy. I have seldom seen a cross-examination go worse.

Charlie Pierce went further. To his ears, the committee Republicans, "products of the conservative bubble," so completely and utterly disgraced themselves so badly that they "made a career hoodlum look good." In fact, Cohen "gave as good as he got, and it was easy to forget for a moment what a bought-and-paid-for hoodlum he'd always been. He did the contrition dance deftly and, by and large, managed to stay cool under Meadows's provocation and Jordan's idiocies. He even did a better job debunking some of the alleged Trump misdeeds-- love-children, the mysterious meeting in Prague-- than the Republicans on the commitee bothered to do. There was something about him that yearned for the old days when he was sitting around Trump Tower with the boss, paying off porn stars and threatening high-school records offices. It would have been poignant if it wasn't all as sordid as the worst brothel on the Singapore docks."



Anyone who watched the first half of the questioning has to agree with White's assessment, basically that "this was an opportunity to build the outline of a case against Trump. Democrats didn’t. Instead, they triumphantly repeated Cohen’s more salacious accusations, speechified, and uncritically embraced Cohen’s I-am-a-sinner-seeking-redemption narrative." Once they got back from their voting for gun control break, though, the questioning abruptly changed. The tired old lawyers with all the seniority and dulled chops, like the useless Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were replaced by fiery, younger members who were out for blood and weren't interested in bragging about themselves. Ro Khanna (D-CA) led the way, along with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), all potential MVPs who had the innate understanding of what they needed to get out of Cohen that the sleepy senior members seem to have lost long, long ago.

Perhaps the most significant testimony came while AOC was questioning Cohen. Watch:



The Democrats haven't subpoenaed Trump's taxes yet. Why not. People tend to blame House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-MA), which is fine-- except he's not alone in his clear dereliction of duty. What about House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY)? House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA)? Or, very obviously, House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-MD). They all have something in common-- Pelosi. She decides something that big, not them. Recently CREDO Action and several other groups sent Pelosi a note complaining about Neal's reticence. They sent it to the right place.

We are writing you as organizations who believe that fairness and equity in both the writing and implementation of tax law is of critical importance. Our commitment to fairness is why we urge you to take every available step to ensure that the House Ways and Means Committee fulfills its Constitutional obligation to provide stringent oversight.

Congress’ oversight authority is broad, encompassing investigation designed to hold both government and corporations accountable. Zealous oversight is how lawmakers learn what laws must be tweaked and what new laws must be drafted. And in the field of tax, the need for reform could not be clearer.

Yet despite the exigency of strong oversight of tax collection, we have watched with growing concern as the Ways and Means Committee has been conspicuously slow to investigate the critical departments and agencies within its jurisdiction. Trump’s Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are charged with not only the difficult task of fighting “run of the mill” tax avoidance and tax evasion, but also to implement a sweeping new tax law written in considerable haste in late 2017.

Hanging over these complex issues of interpretation and policymaking is the fact that the President and his family have not divested themselves of a sprawling business empire. Additionally, many of the key figures in his administration, such as Jared Kushner, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, retain vast and complex portfolios either personally or within their families.

In other words-- even if the Trump Administration were an ordinary presidency, the decaying ability of the IRS to collect revenue owed by the richest individuals and corporations would demand serious attention. And the nature of the Trump tax law and the conflicts of interest which envelop Trump Administration’s senior personnel only serves to deepen the urgency.

Chairman Richard Neal’s term heading the Ways and Means Committee has not commenced in a manner that gives us confidence that under his Chairmanship the Committee is poised to provide the timely and stringent oversight America’s rule-abiding taxpayers deserve. Doing that requires both focusing the work of the entire committee as well as unleashing the Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Congressman John Lewis-- including ensuring that the Oversight Subcommittee has adequate resources for vigorous and wide-ranging oversight work.

Because we believe that the Trump Administration’s implementation of its tax collection and tax law interpretation responsibilities cries out for energetic oversight, we ask for you and your leadership team to work with Chairman Neal and the Ways and Means Committee to make sure that the 116th Congress fulfills its Constitutional responsibilities.

A month ago Eleanor Eagan and Jeff Hauser, writing for the Center for Economic and Policy Center's blog, also tried pressuring Neal, reminding him that Democrats ran and won on an anti-corruption platform and that they now needed to "fulfill their promises to bring accountability to Trump, his powerful allies, and corporate bad actors. Oversight is an incredibly powerful tool that can shine a light on overlooked issues, unearth answers about clandestine misbehavior, and generate consensus around reforms.

"Unfortunately," they continued, "Richard Neal (D-MA), the Chairman of the powerful House Committee on Ways and Means, has already retreated from his earlier promise to request Trump’s tax returns expeditiously. Since Neal’s alarming decision became clear, we have worked diligently to make the case that his aversion to conflict with Trump and powerful corporate interests is wrong and that his hesitancy to conduct stringent oversight is of broad public concern," who they accused of being-- provably-- a corrupted corporate Democrat from a bright blue district who has spent way too much time in DC to be an even remotely effective agent of change.

Forget Richard Neal. Look what AOC did in her question time (in the PBS video above). By asking Cohen about how Trump cheated the IRS-- with questions like "Do you think we need to review his financial statements and his tax returns in order to compare them?" and about how he reduced his real estate tax bills by deflating the reported value of his assets-- she absolutely gave Cummings a casus belli to request the returns. "Would it help for the committee to obtain," she asked Cohen, "federal and state tax returns from the president and his company to address that discrepancy? Cohen, the in the straight man role he relishes: "I believe so."