Ignatius: Our long national nightmare is just beginning
By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
We were reminded of an explosive political fact this week: The investigations of President Trump’s activities won’t end when special counsel Robert Mueller presents his report to the Justice Department. They’ll move into a new and potentially more divisive phase.
“The congressional investigative effort will be ongoing. It will continue through 2020, and beyond if Trump wins re-election and the Democrats retain the House,” predicted Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer under Trump, in an interview Thursday. “The Mueller report isn’t going to end everything.”
The prospect for continuing, and perhaps escalating, legal confrontation was clear from the jaw-dropping congressional testimony Wednesday by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer. Cohen said he is cooperating with a probe by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan into other potential criminal issues involving Trump, beyond Mueller’s inquiry. It’s impossible to know the seriousness of those probes or the jeopardy they pose for Trump and his family, but they aren’t going away soon.
Cohen, with his raspy voice and baggy-eyed face, spoke like a penitent mobster as he offered new evidence about what he alleged was Trump’s role in both directing “hush money” payments to a porn star and massaging financial documents to gain more loans from Deutsche Bank. Cohen also claimed to have “understood the code” on what he asserted was Trump’s record as a “con man” and “cheat.” Congressional committees are already drawing up witness lists to pursue those threads.
Even without Cohen’s headline-grabbing allegations, it became clear this month that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and other congressional investigators were crossing Trump’s self-declared “red line” and beginning to investigate his personal and family finances, including his relationship with Deutsche Bank, perhaps his biggest lender. A Deutsche Bank spokesman told me two weeks ago that the company was cooperating with the investigations.
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