Noah Feldman, Columnist

BuzzFeed's Trump-Cohen Story Describes Clearly Impeachable Crimes

The tale of a presidential coverup is familiar — and troubling.

January 18, 2019 at 5:48 PM UTC

Updated on

January 19, 2019 at 2:29 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Covered up.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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It’s all about the coverup. If the BuzzFeed story reporting that Donald Trump, while president, ordered his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress is true, it’s more than enough to constitute high crimes and misdemeanors under the Constitution — whether Trump’s campaign “colluded” with Russia or not.

On that second, separate issue of collusion, the story is suggestive but not definitive. It says that Trump knew all about and directed Cohen’s negotiations with Russian intermediaries during the 2016 campaign to try to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. That’s highly problematic, but not necessarily criminal or even proof of conspiring to affect the election. If the story BuzzFeed broke Thursday night is true, we know that Trump wanted very badly to hide the facts of the negotiation, even after the fact. But we don’t know how deep the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians went.