During the first break in Wednesday’s explosive House Oversight Committee hearing with former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin expressed his deep disappointment with the members of Congress who spent the morning questioning him.
“I am struck by the breathtaking incompetence of the questioning,” Toobin said. “This endless bloviating and not actually getting any information out of the witness.” At the same time, he added, “A couple of times there were some facts disclosed.”
“I thought it was very interesting that he talked a little bit about how the Stormy Daniels payment took shape and he mentioned that Allen Weisselberg was deeply involved in that, the CFO of the Trump Organization,” he said. “And of course, that the president was involved at every step in that process, which of course, the president has denied.”
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The other moment that stood out to Toobin was Cohen’s disclosure that Trump “submitted knowingly false financial statements to Deutsche Bank in order to get a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills.” Even though “that loan was never given and they never bought the Buffalo Bills,” he explained that if Trump “knowingly submit a financial statement that was false, that's a crime in and of itself so that, I'll bet, pricked up the ears of prosecutors out and about.”
Earlier in the segment, CNN’s Dana Bash raised “one potential problem” for Michael Cohen related to his insistence that he never wanted a job in Trump’s White House. According to CNN’s reporting, she said, “he very much wanted a job in the White House.”
“I think a lot of us here raised our eyebrows, because we knew it to not be true,” Jake Tapper said of that exchange. “I think the issue there is that one sentence: 'I did not want to go to the White House.' All of our reporting suggests that's not true.”
