February 27, 2019

Michael Cohen’s Testimony Today Was Explosive, But Probably Not Explosive Enough

Christy Bowe/ZUMA

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 I assume you’ve all been getting your Michael Cohen fixes elsewhere. I myself only watched his testimony off and on, and taken as a whole it confirmed for me that it’s going to be hard to nail Donald Trump on anything. As explosive as Cohen’s testimony was, it’s clear that Trump treated even trusted associates with the caution and animal cunning of a mob boss who’s aware that even the most private conversation might be bugged. He never told anyone to lie to Congress. (He may have told them to lie to the public, but that’s not illegal.) He never got his own hands dirty. He never said anything that could be directly incriminating. For example:

Cohen alleges that in July of 2016, Trump held a phone call with longtime adviser Roger Stone, in which Stone informed him that a WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton emails was coming, to which Trump said something like: “Wouldn’t that be great.”

Was Trump aware of this before it happened? Did he play any role in getting WikiLeaks to dump the emails? Maybe, but who knows?

I could end up being wrong about this—I hope I’m wrong about this—but I continue to suspect that Mueller will end up with lots of indictments of Trump associates but nothing clear enough to get to Trump himself.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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