By Gary Topping–
Like many Americans, I was transfixed recently by Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee. I didn’t listen to the live testimony as my wife and sixteen million other people did all day long on NPR, but I checked in periodically on the news app on my computer as the salient points of his testimony and the interrogation were reported. Not since the testimony of John Dean (another Presidential personal lawyer) against Richard Nixon in the 1970s have I witnessed such a dramatic spectacle.
Dramatic, certainly, but not particularly enlightening. I was forcibly struck by the lack of honest truth-seeking on both sides as the day proceeded: the Democrats were almost visibly smacking their chops at each of Cohen’s allegations of President Trump’s character as a con man, a racist and a cheat (Cohen’s words), while the Republicans doggedly refused to take seriously anything offered by a man they have branded as a hopelessly congenital liar.
Thus the politicians. How about us, we bloggers here at TheBoyMonk, who are heavily weighted with lawyers and historians? Presumably uninterested in scoring political points, how would we, within the methods of our professions, deal with an admittedly difficult witness? Without taxing the patience of our readers with some heavy disquisition on those methods, I thought this week that I might offer some simple thoughts on getting reliable information from an unreliable source. We historians and lawyers have to do that all the time.
A productive first step would be to reject the Calvinism of the Republicans, who seem to hold that once one is caught in a lie (as Cohen himself admits) there is no possibility of him ever telling the truth about anything. Original Sin has doomed one to Total Depravity. I have posted on that idea before, in the case of “Stormy Daniels,” the porn star whose silence Cohen claims to have purchased with money from the President (see: https://theboymonk.com/john-calvin-meets-stormy-daniels/). Because she earns her livelihood in a way that most of us consider reprehensible, she has forfeited her right, so the Calvinists say, to be taken seriously on any issue whatsoever.
We Christians are big on sin and repentance, even in the case of jailhouse conversions, which seems to be Cohen’s case. Even Ms. Daniels’s lack of repentance regarding her profession should not, in my view, helplessly impugn her credibility, so it seems to me that Cohen’s repentance should entitle him all the more to a serious, if wary, hearing.
So now, to shift to the Democrats’ position, if we’re going to take Cohen seriously, at least to some degree, how do we exercise that wariness in evaluating his testimony? Well, we should expect him to back that testimony with documentation, so that he’s not just asking us to take his word at face value. Apparently he offered a hefty package of documentation at the time of his committee appearance last week, so my suggestion would be to follow up on that. Also, he claims to have met with Special Counsel Robert Mueller several times (I think he said seven), and I presume that Mueller, a famously careful investigator, will have required documentary support at those meetings.
Truth is a regrettably frequent casualty in the political process, and I’m afraid the Cohen testimony is no exception. But I believe that between the polar alternatives of believing everything he says or nothing, there is a vast middle ground within which careful, impartial—and wary—investigators in honest pursuit of Truth can operative very effectively. At TheBoyMonk we have staked our professional lives on that proposition.
