The Washington Post :
House Democrats on Friday moved to accelerate their investigations into President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russian interests, reacting to an explosive but unconfirmed report that Trump directed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about his push for a Moscow real estate project.
The assertions contained in a BuzzFeed News report landed like a mortar in Washington, where Trump and Democrats are already locked in a weeks-long standoff that has shut down large swaths of the federal government over Trump’s demand that taxpayers provide funding for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Friday evening, BuzzFeed said the special counsel’s office disputed certain claims made in the report. “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” said the unusual statement from the spokesperson for the special counsel’s office shared by BuzzFeed.
The claims in the news reports prompted Democrats, who now control the House, to ratchet up their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, including allegations that the Trump campaign cooperated with Russian operatives and that Trump has since sought to obstruct an ongoing probe by special counsel Robert Mueller III.
“We know that the President has engaged in a long pattern of obstruction,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in a tweet, promising to “get to the bottom” of the allegations in BuzzFeed’s report.
“Directing a subordinate to lie to Congress,” Nadler added, “is a federal crime.” Some Democrats on Friday also revived calls for Trump’s impeachment, though House leaders and most Democrats have sought to tamp down talk of moving toward that option.
In the report published late Thursday night, BuzzFeed quoted two unnamed federal law enforcement officials saying that Cohen acknowledged to prosecutors that the president directed him to deceive Congress about key facts linking the president to the proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow. BuzzFeed also said Mueller learned about the directive to lie from “interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.”
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying under oath to Congress about negotiations over the Moscow project, but there is no indication in public filings or proceedings that he was instructed to lie at Trump’s direction. The Washington Post has not independently verified the BuzzFeed report.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani on Friday issued a flat denial of the BuzzFeed report.
“Any suggestion – from any source – that the President counseled Michael Cohen to lie is categorically false,” Giuliani said in a statement. “Today’s claims are just more made-up lies born of Michael Cohen’s malice and desperation, in an effort to reduce his sentence.”
