Michael Cohen raised a litany of allegations against his former boss, Donald Trump, in explosive testimony before Congress this week, implicating the president and his inner circle in potential criminal wrongdoing on multiple accounts.
Now House Democrats plan to use Cohen’s revelations as a blueprint to summon key witnesses and pursue investigative avenues they say their Republican counterparts have ignored. That is likely to trigger a steady flow of public hearings involving those closest to the president as Democrats hunt for more damaging revelations.
No one is off limits, including Trump’s adult children Donald Jr and Ivanka or the gatekeeper to his finances, the Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg.
“All you have to do is follow the transcript,” Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the House oversight and reform committee, before which Cohen testified on Wednesday, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “If there were names that were mentioned, or records that were mentioned during the hearing, we want to take a look at all of that.”
The issues raised by Cohen, who for nearly a decade worked as Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, were myriad and spanned several of the continuing investigations being overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York.
Democrats have expressed caution not to interfere with the work of those inquiries, particularly as they await the results of the special counsel investigation in the imminent future. But Cohen’s testimony, they said, provided several strands of new evidence that laid the groundwork to further investigate Trump’s business dealings, tax returns, ties to Russia and possible obstruction of justice.
“If Mr Cohen’s allegations are correct, it means the president, while in office, literally while in the Oval Office, was engaged in criminal activity, and that is furthering this campaign fraud scheme,” Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, told CNN.
In the aftermath of Cohen’s testimony, House Democrats zeroed in on at least three major lines of inquiry: negotiations over the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign; hush money payments to women and attempts by the president and his team to engage in an alleged coverup; and claims by Cohen that Trump knowingly engaged in insurance fraud.
Cohen also testified before the House intelligence committee on Thursday for nearly eight hours behind closed doors, which Democrats said reinforced the need to more aggressively follow some of the leads that have come to light thus far.
Following the closed-door session, Schiff announced that Cohen would appear before the…
