The following quote is excerpted from page 196 of Michael Cohen’s February 18, 2019 deposition before an executive session of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. House of Representatives. Mr. Cohen is talking about how President Trump asked him to lie to Congress not by making an explicit request but rather by talking “in code.”
This is a line of questioning the several members pursued with Cohen in this behind-closed-doors hearing. In this case, Cohen decided to respond to Chairman Adam Schiff’s curiosity about the president’s coded language by giving an example from the Stormy Daniels fiasco. His point here isn’t that this has anything directly to do with his perjurious congressional testimony. He’s just trying to explain how Trump lets you know that he wants you to lie for him. In this case, he wanted Michael Cohen to lie to First Lady Melania Trump.
The Republicans members of the House Intelligence Committee spent most of their time during this deposition struggling to understand how Trump could be responsible for Cohen’s perjury when he never came right out and told him to lie to Congress and, in fact, criticized Cohen for resisting the subpoena to testify in the first place.
Cohen was explaining that by continually telling him and the American people that there was nothing to the Russia story and that it was a hoax and a witch hunt, and that he had absolutely no business dealings or ambitions with Russia, that he was doing the exact same thing that he did to his wife with respect to the Stormy Daniels story.
He cheated and he lied. He lied brazenly. He got others to lie for him.
And he never had to explicitly ask people to lie for him. He just let them know what he expected them to say and they went out and said it.
