Washington reporters and big media outlets tend to look down their noses at Buzzfeed, but Buzzfeed has broken a number of political stories over the past few years, including the first in-depth reporting on the Steele Dossier. All of those quizzes and pop culture ephemera are paying for a solid Buzzfeed Washington Bureau, I think. Anyway, Buzzfeed’s Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier have broken another story: Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has told special counsel Robert Mueller and other investigators that Trump directed him to lie about Trump Tower Moscow (aka The Moscow Project). I know, this isn’t really shocking in the sense that it’s brand new information across the board – once we knew that the plans for “Trump Tower Moscow” were a big part of how Vladimir Putin honey-trapped Trump, most of us assumed that Trump was lying about ALL of it.

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter. Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen. And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying about the deal in testimony and in a two-page statement to the Senate and House intelligence committees. Special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Cohen’s false claim that the project ended in January 2016 was an attempt to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1” — widely understood to be Trump — “in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations.”

Now the two sources have told BuzzFeed News that Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement. The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.

This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But Cohen’s testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia.

[From Buzzfeed]

The thing about it is… Michael Cohen doesn’t have a lot of credibility. Paul Manafort doesn’t have any credibility. Michael Flynn doesn’t have any credibility. All of these guys were lying all the time about multiple issues, just like Trump lies all the time about everything. Donald Trump isn’t going to be indicted merely because Cohen now claims that Trump directed him to lie. But I still have faith that Robert Mueller is weaving a very bigly quilt of indictments and federal charges and that Cohen’s claims are just the latest thread.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.