Laitetaanpa vielä Lawfaren näkemys, mitä kuulemistilaisuudessa tapahtui. Kun asiasta oli erilaisia näkemyksiä.
Ilmeisesti 100% republikaaniedustajista ei keskittynyt Cohenin mustamaalaamiseen. Yksi (1) edustaja myös kysyi jotain järkevää.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/cohen-silence-breaks-what-make-wednesdays-testimony
It was really two hearings. One (democrats) was a sometimes frustrating, sometimes incompetent, sometimes serious effort to learn what the committee could about the conduct of the man who currently serves as president of the United States. The other hearing (republicans) alternated in five-minute increments with the first but was a different exercise entirely. It involved a confrontation between a man who had devoted a decade of his life to making Trump’s legal, ethical and personal problems go away—a man who once reveled in being dubbed Trump’s “fixer”—yet who now had become one of those problems, and was being confronted by a phalanx of 16 applicants for his old role.
Indeed, with the notable exception of Rep. Justin Amash, who
engaged in a serious colloquy with Cohen about how Trump communicates indirect orders to his subordinates, none of the Republican members of the committee showed any serious interest in developing the factual record about the president’s conduct: not on matters related to
L’Affaire Russe, not on payments to paramours, not on other corruption matters. They showed up, rather, as fixers—very much as Cohen himself would only recently have done. They were there merely to discredit the witness. And in this project they confronted a problem: It is actually hard to brand someone as a liar when he walks in, having recently pleaded guilty to any number of lies, and brands himself as a teller of untruths. There’s not much you can say about such a person that he hasn’t just said about himself.
This didn’t stop members from trying. They berated Cohen. They declared him not credible. They attacked the committee majority for having a witness who would soon go to prison for lying to Congress. And they almost entirely refused to engage the substance of what Cohen was saying. But at the end of the day, the spectacle this generated had changed very little. Cohen was saying the things he was saying; he still had the documents he had brought. And the man about whom he was talking was still of a character that lent credence to his allegations. Despite the spectacle, Cohen’s testimony revealed a lot.
