Cohen testimony: Trump's former lawyer will return to give further evidence - 'I will be back'
Michael Cohen says he is committed to the truth and will return to Capitol Hill in March with further evidence, after three days in Washington that has captivated the country.
The president's former personal lawyer and long-time fixer delivered hours of remarkable claims and accusations against his old boss on Wednesday, including calling him a "racist", "conman" and "cheat"
He returned Capitol Hill on Thursday for his third day of testimony this week, and delivered closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee run by frequent Trump antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
"I am committed to telling the truth and I will be back on March 6th to finish up," Cohen said after that closed door meeting.
The fallout from Cohen's Wednesday testimony was evidence in Washington as he returned for the closed door testimony.
Democratic Representative Eljiah Cummings, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee that hosted Cohen Wednesday, told reporters that anybody who was named multiple times by Cohen could expect to be called in to speak to the panel. During his testimony, the former Trump fixer repeatedly mentioned the president's oldest son Donald Trump Jr, and implicated him in a scheme to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels alongside the chief financial officer of the Trump Organisation.
Meanwhile, Republicans attempted to further cast doubt on Cohen's character, with two Republicans filing a motion with the Department of Justice to consider perjury charges for Cohen over comments he made on Wednesday.
Cohen's lawyer rejected the accusations as baseless.
Meanwhile, Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative, told Rolling Stone magazine she believed Mr Trump's presidency must end in impeachment.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi then attempted to downplay expectations that any effort to impeach the president would make headway in the House.
Hello and welcome to The Independent's coverage as Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen prepares to testify to Congress once again, this time in a hearing behind closed doors.
"Given my experience working for Mr Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power," he said in his closing remarks.
Despite claiming he had not been able to see much of Cohen's testimony, the president said "almost 95 per cent" of the lawyer's evidence had been a lie.
"He lied about so many things. I was actually impressed that he didn’t say, ‘Well I think there was collusion for this reason or that’. He didn’t say that. He said, ‘No collusion’, and I was a little impressed by that frankly, he could have gone all out.
"He went about 95 per cent instead of 100 per cent."
Mr Trump also said it was "incredible" the congressional hearing had taken place during his historic second nuclear summit with the North Korean dictator and described it as a "fake hearing".
However, contrary to what Mr Trump suggested, Cohen did not declare the president innocent of charges of collusion with Russia during the election campaign.
When asked about contacts between the official Trump campaign and Russia, Cohen in fact said he had no “direct evidence” of it but that he had "my suspicions”.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘colluding’. Was there something odd about the back-and-forth praise with President Putin? Yes, but I’m not really sure I can answer the question about collusion,” he said.
Today, Cohen is due to give more evidence about his role in Mr Trump's campaign, but this time behind closed doors.
Later today he will appear before the House Intelligence Committee, who are expected to quiz him on their own investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Although this hearing will be private, it is possible his testimony will be published later, as some previous hearings have.
Another Democrat, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, has said she now believes Mr Trump's impeachment is inevitable.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, conducted before Cohen's blockbuster testimony, Ms Omar said she could not see how the billionaire's presidency could end any other way.
"I believe that impeachment is inevitable. It also a terrifying notion.
"We have not had a full impeachment that removes the president from office. Nations struggle any time [they] overthrow a dictator, and Trump has the markings of a dictator.”
The Republican response to Cohen's explosive claims has been to repeatedly remind Americans he is a disgraced ex-employee who has admitted lying to Congress and is due shortly to begin a prison sentence for perjury, campaign finance violations, and financial fraud.
“You’re a disgraced lawyer. . . . You’re a pathological liar,” said Paul Gosar during the hearing on Wednesday. “There’s no truth to you whatsoever.”
Sean Hannity, the firebrand conservative Fox News host, said the hearing had been orchestrated by Democrats simply to "embarrass the president they have this psychotic hate for".
"You rail on . . . the commander in chief while he’s over across the Pacific Ocean trying to negotiate a deal to make this world safer,” said Republican Representative Bob Gibbs to Cohen.
“Real repentance would be go serve your time and don’t come back here and make allegations towards a man you can’t substantiate.”
Mr Trump has also tried to discredit Cohen. In a tweet sent yesterday he said his former fixer was simply making up accusations in an attempt to minimise his own jail time.
A statement from the Trump campaign also heavily criticised both Mr Cohen - calling him a "felon, disbarred lawyer and a convicted perjurer" - and the Democrats for asking him to give evidence.
"Now he offers what he says is evidence, but the only support for that is his own testimony, which has proven before to be worthless," the statement said.
"As noted by the Southern District of New York, Cohen’s wide array of crimes were ‘marked by a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life’ and his ‘instinct to blame others is strong.’
"Prosecutors said his actions were to ensure that he would ‘profit personally, build his own power, and enhance his level of influence.’
"This is the same Michael Cohen who has admitted that he lied to Congress previously. Why did they even bother to swear him in this time?”
Despite some growing Democratic enthusiasm for moves to impeach the president, the head of congressional Democrats Nancy Pelosi, refused to rise to the bait when questioned by reporters.
"I haven't seen one word of it, I've been in meetings all day," the Speaker of the House of Representatives said when asked what she made of Cohen's accusations of criminality against his former boss.
"Let me say this. I care a lot more about the bad policies of Donald Trump than his bad personality," she added.
Her number two, House majority leader Steny Hoyer echoed Ms Pelosi's caution, and said Democrats were waiting for Robert Mueller's full report before deciding how to proceed.
After the Cohen hearing concluded, the chairman of the committee, Democrat Elijah Cummings, said he wanted to "proceed cautiously".
"Isn’t it interesting that not one person on our side even mentioned the word impeachment?" he told reporters. "Not one."
Despite the efforts to dampen speculation, a growing number of Democrat activists and those in the progressive wing of the party want to move more quickly towards impeaching Mr Trump.
Newly-elected Detroit Representative Rashida Tlaib said most of her constituents were not interested in Mr Mueller's legal deliberations and wanted to know "whether or not there’s a crooked CEO in the Oval Office".
Over at Independent Voices, Molly Jong-Fast has this take on Mr Cohen's day at Congress:
It’s hard to feel sympathy for a man who harassed journalists and paid off porn stars, but it’s possible that these GOP Congressional members achieved it. Bravo
Cohen has just arrived for his behind-closed-doors hearing with the House Intelligence Committee.
This session will be the third time in three days the ex-lawyer has appeared before a congressional committee to give evidence about his role in Mr Trump's campaign.
Before his dramatic televised hearing yesterday, he gave testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who is about to oversee Cohen's closed door testimony, has ribbed Donald Trump for the results of the Hanoi summit this week.
"Walking away from the summit was better than making a bad deal. It’s also the result of a poorly planned strategy," he said. "But accepting Kim’s denial of involvement in Warmbier’s death? Detestable, and harkens back to Trump’s duplicitous acceptances of denials from other dictators."
Fordham University has confirmed Cohen's claim that Donald Trump's legal team — including himself — threatened the school with legal action if it released Mr Trump's academic records during the 2016 campaign.
Fordham spokesman Bob Howe told the Associated Press that they were first threatened with legal action, and then a follow up email was sent "summarizing the call and reminding us that they would take action against the university if we did, in fact, release Mr Trump’s records."
Today's testimony will be behind closed doors, but the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee where Cohen is speaking is likely to cause some concern for Donald Trump.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff has shown himself to be very capable of getting on the president's nerves, and is in charge of an investigation that yields subpoena power.
Mr Schiff is a California Democrat, and said that a lot of Cohen's testimony during an open testimony on Wednesday "bolstered his credibility". Mr Schiff and his democratic colleagues have also promised to release the special counsel's report on its investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, no matter what the president thinks.
Republican Matt Gaetz found himself in trouble this week after tweeting what was interpreted by some as a threat to Cohen the night before his public testimony.
While Mr Gaetz later apologised for the remarks — which raised eyebrows as potential witness tampering — a tweet from a staff writer at the Atlantic could indicate he knew what he was doing. Check it out:
From yesterday's open testimony, a heated moment between Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib and Republican Representative Mark Meadows.
After Mr Meadows brought up a black woman who is employed in the Trump administration to prove Donald Trump is not racist, Ms Tlaib called the act racist. Mr Meadows stopped everything to demand a clarification that he was not himself a racist.
Republicans on Wednesday repeatedly questioned why they should believe Cohen, since he had already admitted to lying under oath to Congress.
It appears that Cohen's repeated insistence that he did not want a job at the White House at the start of the Trump presidency is their proof that the president's former personal lawyer is still misleading Congress.
Here's the president's adult son, and frequent surrogate, weighing in:
