Cohen’s Lawyer Drops Rudy Giuliani/Witness Tampering Evidence

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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has done no favors to his public image by taking on the legal defense of President Donald Trump. This past week on Good Morning America, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis asserted that Giuliani’s behavior has now warranted a federal criminal investigation over his apparent obstruction of justice targeted at Davis’s client.

He told host George Stephanopoulos:

‘Let me be very clear, the House of Representatives now has an obligation. A resolution of censure when the president of the United States indisputably intimidates and obstructs justice to prevent a witness from testifying is in order. So is a federal criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani for witness tampering. Calling out a man’s father-in-law and wife in order to intimidate the witness is not fair game.’

Watch below.

As Davis indicates, Giuliani joined the president in going after Cohen’s family ahead of public Congressional testimony he’d been set to give on February 7. That testimony has been postponed in the wake of what Cohen’s team referred to as “threats” from the president’s team.

Trump has multiple times claimed that Cohen’s father-in-law is worthy of investigative scrutiny without any apparent evidence pushing him that direction. Decades ago, Fima Shusterman pleaded guilty to federal income tax fraud — but that’s it. Again without any apparent evidence, when pressed over the president’s apparent attempts to intimidate his former fixer, Giuliani claimed that Trump was just defending himself and Shusterman may have ties to organized crime.

Even still, Giuliani wants us to trust his defense of the president.

Although there’s been no apparent actual moves that direction, key House Democrats seem like they would be open to Davis’s suggestion of a criminal investigation into Giuliani.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (Md.), Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff (Calif.), and Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (N.Y.) all backed the assertion:

‘[E]fforts to intimidate witnesses, scare their family members, or prevent them from testifying before Congress are textbook mob tactics that we condemn in the strongest terms.’

Trump has carried on with this exact pattern of behavior before, threateningly claiming at one point that there were tapes of conversations he had with former FBI Director James Comey before he testified to Congress when there actually weren’t any tapes.

Still, it seems as though actually getting a chance to question Cohen is higher on the agenda than pursuing obstruction of justice allegations for House Democrats, who are newly in the majority. They’ve asserted that they will still pursue testimony from the former Trump lawyer, no matter the president’s threats.

Cohen has long established at this point that he no longer maintains any allegiance to the president and would likely seek to be cooperative with Democratic demands. Among the most recent developments in his case, he’s begun cooperating with Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller as part of a deal that includes a guilty plea to lying to Congress about the scope of efforts to construct a Trump Tower Moscow. Cohen had previously been more informally cooperating with federal investigators looking into non-Russia related matters in New York.

Featured Image via Screenshot from the video