The televised Congressional testimony today by Michael D. Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and (in)famous “fixer” will paint Trump as a “racist…conman” and a “cheat” and will reportedly present some evidence in the form of signed checks that Trump violated the law while in office.

His prepared testimony has been released and his appearance in an open session — in which Republicans will try to discredit him as they continue to play defense-attorneys for Trump — promises to be highly dramatic. The prepared statement itself almost looks like a Hollywood mob drama movie script.

The New York Times:

Michael D. Cohen plans to tell Congress on Wednesday that President Trump is a “con man” and a “cheat” who knew a longtime adviser was communicating with WikiLeaks — and who implicitly instructed Mr. Cohen to lie about a Trump Tower project in Moscow that was underway during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The extraordinary testimony will take place when Mr. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and fixer, publicly appears before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. An advance copy of Mr. Cohen’s testimony was obtained Tuesday night by reporters at multiple news organizations, including The New York Times, just as Mr. Trump began meetings in Vietnam before convening with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un….

In a statement earlier Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, condemned Mr. Cohen as a “disgraced felon.”

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“It’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies,” she said.

In vivid and at times tortured language, Mr. Cohen plans to use his opening remarks to unspool a narrative laced with regret of his decade working alongside Mr. Trump, including episodes during the 2016 campaign that are believed to be at the center of investigations by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and federal prosecutors in New York.

The testimony underscores many of the unsavory themes and stories that have recurred in public reporting about Mr. Trump — he inflates his wealth, makes racist remarks, threatens his enemies and tries to bend the law to his favor — but puts them on the record, under oath, in the voice of a man who was one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides.

“I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience,” Mr. Cohen plans to say. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.”

But there are also more perilous claims that could further highlight Mr. Trump’s potential legal exposure in the investigations that have already ensnared Mr. Cohen and other Trump associates. Mr. Cohen’s testimony before the Oversight Committee will be his first in public, before Congress, but he has already spent more than 70 hours with Mr. Mueller’s investigators and with federal prosecutors in New York investigating a scheme hatched in the run-up to the 2016 election to make hush money payments to a pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen and his account will be subjected to deep scrutiny by Republicans, who have already begun to hammer away with questions about his past business dealings and credibility. They plan to use Wednesday’s hearing to paint Mr. Cohen as self-centered and untrustworthy — a man who ran afoul of the law, including by lying to Congress once before, and then once he was caught, sought to spin lies about his former boss to reduce his time in prison.

Mr. Cohen will address his own past lies head-on and plans to use documents to try to bolster certain claims. He plans to draw a picture of Mr. Trump using the type of nonspecific directives more often associated with organized crime bosses than with American presidents.

“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,” Mr. Cohen plans to say. “In his way, he was telling me to lie.”

He will add: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.”

The Washington Post:

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, will tell Congress on Wednesday that Trump knew his longtime adviser Roger Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks about publishing stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, according to the text of his prepared opening statement.

In the prepared remarks, Cohen calls Trump a “racist,” a “conman” and a “cheat” and also levels accusations that the president personally signed a check to cover “hush money payments” to keep quiet an affair with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. Cohen says Trump never directly told him to lie to Congress about his business dealings in Moscow, but claims the president implicitly encouraged him to do so.

A person familiar with the testimony said the document, which was first published by Politico, reflects what Cohen submitted as his prepared remarks, though they could change somewhat when he delivers them Wednesday to the House Oversight Committee.

“He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat,” the remarks say, referring to Trump. “He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.

…Cohen plans to testify that in July 2016, shortly before the Democratic convention, he overheard Trump and Stone discussing Assange’s plans. WikiLeaks released stolen DNC emails on July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic convention.

“Days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange 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,” the testimony notes. “Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of ‘wouldn’t that be great.’”

Stone was indicted last month for lying, obstruction and witness tampering in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump has denied ever talking with Stone about WikiLeaks. The person familiar with the testimony said Cohen does not have other evidence, such as contemporaneous memos, to support his recollection of the call he claims to have overheard between Stone and the president.

He will also testify that in private Trump is an outright racist.

“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole.’ This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States,” Cohen’s testimony notes. “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.”

AND:

Cohen says Trump directed him to pay off Daniels and to lie to Melania Trump about the relationship. Cohen plans to give Congress a copy of the $130,000 wire transfer he sent Daniels’s attorney during the campaign as well what he describes as a $35,000 check signed by the president from his personal bank account on Aug. 1, 2017. He says it was one in a series of installments Trump made to reimburse him for that hush-money payout.

He will also display a second $35,000 check, dated March 17, 2017, this one signed by Trump Jr. and Trump Organization Chief Operating Officer Allen Weisselberg, a person familiar with Cohen’s plans said. The check offers the first evidence that the president’s son may also have been involved with the reimbursement scheme.

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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