President Donald Trump said Sunday that the congressional testimony of Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, was in part responsible for the collapse in negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear program last week – continuing to vent about the investigations encircling him and his associates.
During seven hours of testimony Wednesday, Cohen said that Trump manipulated financial records and that Trump knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ efforts to release damaging information about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign, among other allegations.
The testimony unfolded as Trump had traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam, to try to forge a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over curbing the North Korean nuclear program.
While in Vietnam, the president said he walked away from the summit with Kim because of a disagreement about economic sanctions on North Korea. But he gave another explanation for the failure of the talks on Twitter on Sunday evening.
“For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the ‘walk,’ ” he tweeted. “Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!”
Lanny Davis, Cohen’s attorney, declined to comment on Trump’s tweet Sunday night.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., had gone through multiple dates for its highly anticipated hearing with Cohen, who has been called to appear before several congressional panels and is scheduled to go to prison in May.
Cohen had been slated to appear publicly before the Oversight Committee on Feb. 7 but canceled, citing potential threats against his family. On Feb. 20, the committee said that it had rescheduled Cohen’s testimony for Wednesday. The president had announced the dates for his second summit with Kim during his State of the Union address on Feb. 5.
Some of Trump’s closest allies similarly criticized Democrats for holding a hearing with Cohen while the president was overseas. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called the scheduling a “new low” and accused Democrats’ “hatred of Trump” of undercutting the nuclear talks.
A spokeswoman for the Oversight Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.
Trump has repeatedly complained about the Cohen testimony and the escalating investigations of him since he returned from Hanoi without an agreement with Kim. He derided “bull—-” investigations and mocked the “collusion delusion” in a long-winded speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington on Saturday afternoon.
Earlier Sunday evening, he tweeted – as he has done many times before – about “Presidential Harassment” from “crazed” Democrats, calling it at the “highest level in the history of our Country.”
(c) 2019, The Washington Post · Seung Min Kim
{Matzav.com}
The less the Mueller investigation seems to have on Trump, the more we find out how corrupt the FBI was in the days of the 2016 election and afterward.
The Trump team was deliberately set up by the US and foreign agents in an elaborate sham that seems to have begun in London.
George Papadopolous, the unpaid Trump volunteer that was indicted by the Mueller investigation for lying, was snared into meeting with a Russian which subsequently led to his indictment.
In an interview with former Secret Service Agent and author, Dan Bongino, Papadopoulos shared the following, according to The Gateway Pundit:
**Bongino: I want to get right to it. I have a list of questions for you..I guess the easiest question to ask is why did you meet with Mifsud?
Papadopoulos: Professor Mifsud is a Maltese professor. Just so everybody understands – he’s not a Russian.
I was working at this organization in London – the London Center for International Law Practice (LCILP) – that unbeknownst to me at the time was apparently some sort of front group for ex-western diplomats and ex-western intelligence types of personalities.
As well, the legal counsel for the FBI in the UK, Arvinder Sambei, just happens to also be a director at this organization I used to work for. I tell this organization ‘Look, I’m joining the Trump Campaign, I’m leaving. I’m going back to the U.S. I’m leaving London.
But they all of a sudden tell me, ‘before you leave, you really need to come to Rome with us. We want to introduce you to some people there.’ So, I say, ‘that’s fine. I’ll go to Rome. It’s a three-day holiday before I get back to Washington.
They introduce me to Josef Mifsud at this university in Rome called Link Campus. This isn’t any normal university in Rome. At the time I had no idea what this place was. But apparently, it’s a training ground for western intelligence operatives in Rome. The CIA has held symposiums there. David Ignatius from the Washington Post has actually written extensively about this place. They have connections to the FBI and other groups.
I also saw many Italian diplomats there. The ex-foreign minister of Italy was the director of this university, so things started to pop in my mind that this isn’t just a random event – a random meeting.
They tell me it’s very important for you to meet Josef Mifsud. I had no idea who this person was. He came up to me, presented himself as this mid-fifties, former diplomat, who knew the world.
The FBI, DOJ, the Mueller team, and the mainstream media all desperately needed to find some way to connect Trump to Russia, so they set Papadopoulus up so they could claim he met with Russians.
There’s only one problem: the Russian was not, indeed, a Russian. He was a Maltese professor, Josehp Mifsud. All the connections in London were a setup.
Joseph Mifsud is also connected to Mueller’s team.
From one investigative source that TGP cites
“Zainab Ahmad, a member of Mueller’s legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn, Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security [GCCS] event in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter: “Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She’s a GCCS consultant.”
WaPo and the lamestream media jumped on a snide remark the President said, and misquoted it and took it out of context.
The remark was it “may have contributed to the ‘walk,’ ” not that it did either totally or partially.