Michael Cohen testimony blistering but there’s no silver bullet

Michael Cohen testifies before the House Oversight Committee. Picture: AFP.

The blistering public attack on Donald Trump today by his former lawyer Michael Cohen will damage the president, but it does not appear to contain the silver bullet Democrats had hoped for.

The key line in Cohen’s public testimony in Washington today was that he has no evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia, only that he had had his “suspicions.”

But Cohen did accuse Trump of lying about his knowledge of key moments in the Russia investigation.

These included whether Trump had advance knowledge of the release of Russia-hacked Democrat emails by Wikileaks in 2016. Trump has denied this yet Cohen says he overheard Trump being told about this by his longtime Adviser Roger Stone.

Yet even this revelation — if true — does not necessarily prove that Trump colluded with Russia.

Likewise, Cohen claims that he suspects Trump knew in advance about the so-called Trump Tower meeting between his son Donald Jrn and a Kremlin-connected Russia lawyer in 2016 to receive dirt on Hillary Clinton. Once again, Trump has denied this.

But Cohen’s claims in relation to this rely only on a half-heard comment between Trump and his son Donald about an unnamed meeting having been arranged.

The bigger danger for Trump is that if he has lied about these issues publicly, he may potentially have perjured himself in the written answers he has provided under oath to the special counsel Robert Mueller.

COHEN TESTIMONY: Trump ‘racist, conman, cheat’

This first thing to say about Cohen’s testimony is that it must be placed into its proper context. Cohen is about to serve three years jail for bank and tax fraud and also for previously lying to Congress. He says he lied previously to protect Trump but now he is telling the truth. Yet Cohen also has motivation to portray Trump in the worst possible light given his own fall from grace and the public attacks on him by the president for whom he once pledged to “take a bullet”.

Having said that, Cohen’s testimony — which was widely watched around the US — cannot help but hurt the president’s public standing. It was a remarkable and broad ranging character assassination on Trump who Cohen described as a racist, a conman and a cheat who had broken the law while in office.

On the legal side, Cohen provided further details of what he said was a breach of campaign finance laws by the president in directing that hush money be paid to two women who claimed to have had affairs with him.

Cohen revealed that Trump repaid some of that hush money to Cohen by writing a personal cheque, which Cohen showed to the committee.

While this is further proof of Mr Trump’s involvement in the hush money payments — which breach campaign finance laws — it does not add much to what we already knew from Cohen’s recent trial.

Experts are divided about whether this issue poses a legal threat to a sitting president.

The most damaging aspect of Cohen’s testimony may simply be the deeply unflattering portrait he paints of Trump.

He portrays him as a vainglorious bully who used legal threats to keep his school grades secret, who used disparaging racial language, who boasting of dodging the Vietnam War draft, who was unfaithful in his marriage and who had no desire to leader to lead the country and who only ran for office to improve his ‘brand.’

None of this will help Trump’s popularity although both his supporters and his critics have long been aware of Trump’s strengths and weaknesses.

While Trump will hate what Cohen has said about him, his testimony does not, in itself, pose any immediate threat to his presidency. From Trump’s perspective it could have been worse.

Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia