House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Wednesday that the portion of Michael Cohen’s prepared testimony about President Donald Trump’s knowledge of the WikiLeaks DNC email dump is the most “significant” in the document, arguing that it shows that Trump was “dishonest with the country” about “stolen Russian documents.”
Schiff also said that the check Cohen is prepared to show with Trump’s signature is also notable.
“He also offers some pretty solid corroboration in terms of the hush money payments if these checks are, in fact, authentic,” he said on CNN.
The chairman argued that Cohen is fairly credible.
“If his only motivation, as the President suggests, is to reduce his sentence or to incriminate the President, then you’d expect him to make a more full throated claim against Donald Trump,” Schiff concludes. “So I find on the face of it, it’s a credible account — certainly that was the conclusion of the special counsel — but the proof is in the pudding.”
In his remarks, Cohen wrote that he was present during a call between Trump and Stone when Trump reacted approvingly to Stone’s news that WikiLeaks would dump Democrats’ hacked emails in coming days. Cohen also said that Trump reimbursed him for the Stormy Daniels hush money payments from his personal account over multiple months during his presidency.
Cohen is due before the House Oversight Committee at 10 a.m. ET Wednesday morning, where he will be grilled about the bombshells dropped in his prepared testimony.
