Michael Cohen will return to Capitol Hill next week to finish his closed-door testimony to lawmakers as President Donald Trump's finance chief plus a Russian mobster associate will get their own turns in the congressional hot seat.
Cohen spent nine and half hours on Thursday testifying to the House Intelligence Committee and will return next Wednesday for his fourth session on Capitol Hill.
'It was very productive and, as I said, I am committed to telling the truth. And I will be back on March 6 to finish up. There is more to discuss,' he told reporters upon leaving the committee room.
Michael Cohen will return to Capitol Hill March 6 for more testimony
'I am committed to telling the truth. And I will be back on March 6 to finish up. There is more to discuss,' Michael Cohen told reporters
House Intelligence panel chair Adam Schiff praised Cohen as cooperative
House Intelligence panel chair Adam Schiff praised Cohen as cooperative.
'None of the questions that we had for him went unanswered,' he told reporters afterward.
One lawmaker said they learned 'very valuable information' from Cohen.
'There was a lot of new very valuable information and that's all I can say on that,' Democratic Rep. Eric Swawell, who is on the Intelligence panel, said after the hearing.
Schiff also announced Felix Sater, a former Russian mobster who was an adviser to the Trump Organization, will testify before his committee in an open hearing on March 14.
Additionally, the panel plans to interview Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who Cohen named in his public testimony on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Schiff did not respond to shouted questions about whether Weisselberg will appear.
Then President-elect Donald Trump along with his son Donald, Jr. as Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of The Trump, looks on
Donald Trump visited Colorado in 2005 to talk at the Bixpo 2005 business convention; at Trump's left, in maroon tie, is businessman Felix Sater
Sater was born in Moscow and moved with to the U.S. with his parents. He spent years as an FBI informant.
A childhood friend of Cohen, Sater worked on hotel and condo deals with the Trump Organization, including the Trump Tower Moscow deal.
When Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in his testimony to lawmakers last December about the Trump Tower Moscow deal, he stated: 'I primarily communicated with the Moscow-based development company ... through a U.S. citizen third-party intermediary, [Individual 2].'
Sater is believed to be Individual 2.
Weisselberg became the topic of renewed interest after Cohen mentioned the Trump Organization CFO as someone who knew about the secret payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels to possible insurance fraud in his testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday.
Prosecutors with the Southern District of New York granted Weisselberg in their probe of the hush money payments.
Weisselberg also serves as the Trump family accountant, which makes him a wealth of information about the president's finances, an area Democrats vowed to explore when they took control of the House of Representatives.
While Cohen's testimony is secret, the public will eventually learn what he told lawmakers behind those closed doors.
Schiff said the committee 'will be at the appropriate point' releasing Cohen's testimony 'publicly,' but 'we're not going to do that before his testimony is complete.'
Cohen arrived on Capitol Hill Thursday for his final round of questions from lawmakers with a behind-closed doors session that will focus on Russia - both the failed Trump Tower Moscow deal and the investigation into Moscow's meddling in the 2016 election.
His attorney, Lanny Davis, gave the press a thumb's up sign as they headed toward the SCIF - the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility - in the basement of the Capitol Visitors' Center where Cohen will answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee.
Michael Cohen arrived on Capitol Hill Thursday for his final round of questioning from lawmakers
Michael Cohen's behind-closed doors session that will focus on Russia - both the failed Trump Tower Moscow deal and the probe into Moscow's meddling in the 2016 election
The day started off with a fumble with Cohen and his team went into the wrong place. They entered the Rayburn House Office Building, where President Donald Trump's former personal attorney spent nearly five hours answering questions before lawmakers in his only public testimony.
They used the underground tunnel system in the Capitol complex to make their way to the correct location. Cohen even rode the underground subway lawmakers use to make their way from the House office buildings to the Capitol building.
Although Cohen didn't address reporters Davis said his client would have a statement at the end of the day when the questioning is done.
Cohen, who spent nine hours on Tuesday answering questions in a closed door session with the Senate Intelligence Committee, is expected to have a similarly long session today.
Schiff, who will lead the questioning of Cohen today, told the DailyMail.com Wednesday that he was watching the president's former fixer's public testimony.
Schiff told PBS he found Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, credible.
'I thought that his testimony was quite striking, and in a very credible fashion,' he told 'Newshour' Wednesday night.
Schiff said the committee would ask about the Trump Tower Moscow project and 'drilling down' on the details.
'We're going to be drilling down on some of the topics you heard about today and some you didn't, but to give you an illustration, Moscow Trump Tower, this project that Michael Cohen talked about today, having repeated conversations on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, while Donald Trump was denying this was happening to the public,' he said.
'We're going to be drilling down in great detail, going over dozens of documents dealing with that transaction, talking about other witnesses to that transaction, talking about who in the Kremlin they were reaching out to for help, going into a lot of detail on that and other issues,' he added.
Cohen's last round of questions follow Wednesday's explosive public hearing with the House Oversight and Reform Committee, where Cohen called the president a racist, a liar and a cheat.
'Mr. Trump is a racist. The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and big got bigots. You have heard him call foreign countries s***holes. He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black wasn't that wasn't a s***hole. This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States,' Cohen said.
'While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. And he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid. And yet I continued to work for him.'
Trump, Cohen also claimed, knew about WikiLeaks' plan to publish hacked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign and would work with 'anyone' to win.
Michael Cohen paused to examine a baseball trophy on his way into Thursday's hearing
Cohen and his team originally went in the wrong building and used the Capitol's underground tunnel system and subway to make their way to the SCIF
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff arrives to question Cohen
He blasted President Trump for an alleged June 2016 conversation with Republican dirty-trickster Roger Stone.
Cohen claims Stone told him that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had told him a 'massive dump' of emails harmful to Hillary Clinton would be released in just a few days.
Stone has claimed he knew nothing about the torrent of emails that would eventually trickle out a month at a time, all hacked from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. He also insists he has had no contact with WikiLeaks.
But U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russian agents stole the materials and used WikiLeaks as a conduit to make them public. Stone, Federal prosecutors have charged Stone, Trump's longtime informal adviser whose political monkeywrenching dates back to the Nixon era, with witness tampering and lying to Congress.
'Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange,' Cohen recounts in his prepared testimony, 'and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.'
In a statement to reporters, Stone said Wednesday: 'Mr. Cohen's statement is not true.'
Stone is under a gag order in his own federal trial for obstruction of an official proceeding, false statements and witness tampering
Cohen will report to prison in May to serve a three-year sentence for crimes he has admitted to, including lying previously to House investigators.
Cohen described briefing Trump on his work to develop a Moscow skyscraper project during the 2016 election, and revealed that he discussed it with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump.
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday, speaking for the first time in a public forum about his experiences related to his criminal conduct and the president's alleged role
Cohen spoke to the Senate Intelligence Committee for nine hours on Tuesday
His guilty plea for lying to Congress related stemmed from his claim under oath that the project was a dead issue by the time Trump won his first 2016 primary contest in New Hampshire. That turned out to be false, and Cohen claimed he misled Congress out of loyalty to his boss.
'I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore,' he said Wednesday.
Cohen said he briefed Trump's children on the project during 'the regular course of business' on about 10 occasions.
'Our goal was to get this project. We were interested in building what would have been the largest building in all of Europe,' he said of his briefings with then-candidate Trump.
Cohen made clear that Trump never directly ordered him to lie about it, but claimed the president indirectly indicated his wishes.
'In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me, 'There's no business in Russia,' and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie,' Cohen said.
He also claimed that Trump asked for updates on the Russia project 'at least a half-dozen times between the Iowa Caucus in January 2016 and the end of June.'
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/03/01/trumps-longtime-finance-chief-and-russian-mobster-associate-will-both-be-questioned-by-congress/
Main photo article Michael Cohen will return to Capitol Hill next week to finish his closed-door testimony to lawmakers as President Donald Trump’s finance chief plus a Russian mobster associate will get their own turns in the congressional hot seat.
Cohen spent nine and half hours on Thursday testifying to...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves US News HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/02/28/22/10431110-6758391-image-a-8_1551393242548.jpg
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