Actor Robert De Niro declared of Trump, ‘The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, he is guilty — and we all know it.’
Some of us thought Michael Cohen was the kind of sleazy operator who left a trail of slime behind him for a long, long time – both when he worked for Trump and when he turned against Trump. As I put it in 2019, “Michael Cohen is the coworker who says he forgot his wallet at lunch, the neighbor who swears he’ll return your garden tools promptly, the salesman who insists it’s easy to get out of the timeshare agreement.”
And there was a time, just a few years ago, when Ben Stiller played Cohen as the ultimate shifty, untrustworthy, shamelessly dishonest con man in Saturday Night Live sketches. Stiller did this opposite Robert De Niro, playing then–special counsel Robert Mueller. De Niro quipped, “Now we are going to catch all you little Fockers, you got that?” to his Meet the Parents co-star.
It didn’t quite shake out that way, although later that year, Cohen pled guilty to eight counts, including one count of making false statements to a federally insured bank.
You will recall that for almost two years, pop-culture venues like SNL portrayed former FBI director Robert Mueller as the smartest, toughest, sharpest investigator in the world, the man who was going to take down Trump. And then, after 22 months, with 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other professional staff at his disposal, after interviewing 500 witnesses, issuing 2,800 subpoenas, 230 orders for communication records, 13 requests to foreign governments, and nearly 500 search warrants, Mueller issued a report concluding he could not find evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia.
Mueller was asked, under oath before Congress, “At any time in the investigation, was your investigation curtailed or stopped or hindered?” And Mueller answered, “No.”
And then Mueller’s aides wrote their own assessments declaring that their boss was a tired, confused old man who “failed to subpoena the president and otherwise pulled punches for fear of incurring Trump’s wrath.” As I wrote at the time, “you don’t get to spend all that time building him up to the point where his face is on prayer candles and ‘In Mueller We Trust’ merchandise is for sale, only to suddenly change your mind and conclude he’s a bumbling, hapless Keystone Cop when he says the evidence isn’t there.”
I mention all this because Robert De Niro, the guy who played Mueller, appeared outside the Manhattan courthouse, arguing that Trump had to be convicted of a felony, because of the reliability and trustworthiness of the testimony of Michael Cohen.
De Niro declared, “The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, he is guilty — and we all know it. I’ve never seen a guy get out of so many things, and we all know this. Everybody in the world knows this.”