Joe Lockhart Sounds Alarm on Cohen’s Trump-Wikileaks Claim: ‘We May Have Found the Fire’

CNN contributor and former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart put the news of  President Donald Trump’s alleged awareness of the anti-Hillary Clinton email dump by Wikileaks in stark relief Wednesday morning.

In advance of the public congressional testimony, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen released a 20 page prepared testimony that included numerous details that are potentially gravely damaging to the Trump administration. Most notably, the fact that he claims that Trump was told in advance by Roger Stone that Wikileaks was in possession of politically damaging information against his political rival.

“Listen, we’ve been smelling a lot of smoke over the last two years, I think we may have found the fire,” ostensibly connecting the news that Trump was informed by Roger Stone in advance of the ill-begotten emails (perhaps coordinated by Russian agents) and the investigation of collusion led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

“This is the first concrete evidence of someone standing up in public, not in a private grand jury, saying that Trump was aware of the efforts to coordinate activities between his campaign and the Russians in order to help turn the election in his favor,” Lockhart opined, adding “And that is stunning.”

Lockhart continued that in his esteem “the probably the most serious question if you’re a Trump supporter is how do all these revelations match up with the written answers he gave Mueller? That, because that’s where the president has a credible peril. Because we know from Cohen in another section that the president and his lawyers were looking at his testimony. And so if the president’s lawyers didn’t know they were encouraging him to lie and suborning perjury or they don’t know what the truth was.”

Cohen is spending three days for both private and public Congressional testimony in Washington D.C. before he turns himself into for incarceration as penance for his plea deal for, among other things, lying to federal authorities. So Cohen’s credibility in these claims will certainly be a narrative debated across the spectrum of political media.

Watch above via CNN.