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Friday, January 18, 2019

A Furor Over Fake News

This morning, the big news pushed all through the mainstream media is a report from BuzzFeed that the President directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Trump Tower project.  Cohen already pled guilty last year to lying to Congress about that subject.  The documents filed at the time of the plea by Cohen made reference to the President, but they said nothing about Cohen being directed to lie.  Today, BuzzFeed says that Trump directed Cohen to lie but gives no named source for the report.

Inescapable logic indicates that this is just Fake News.  Think about it.  There's no way that the prosecutors in New York or in the Special Counsel's office would have let Cohen plead to a charge of lying to Congress without indicating in that paperwork that Cohen was directed to do so by the President.  Remember, Cohen is such a liar that he was willing to plead to anything in order to get a shorter sentence.  Further, if Cohen actually could provide proof that Trump directed him to lie, Mueller and his team would likely have given Cohen a letter attesting to his cooperation and made a strong pitch to the court that he should get no jail time.  Mueller didn't do that.  He didn't even provide a letter of cooperation.  There's simply no way that Cohen told Mueller that he was directed by Trump to lie.

On top of that, it's important to note the way the mainstream media is reporting this.  CBS, for example, is reporting that BuzzFeed says that Cohen was directed by Trump to lie, but CBS adds that it cannot verify that this is true.  When anti-Trump media takes care not to claim that the charge is true, you can bet that it is not.  Indeed, my guess is that the media knows that this is false.

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