As with so many other moments of the Trump era, the hearing seemed to be as much about partisan theater as fact-finding. Democrats and Republicans set forth their conflicting narratives about the man who once served Mr. Trump, either as a duplicitous disgruntled former employee or a fallen sinner trying to redeem himself by coming clean.
Through it all sat Mr. Cohen, 52, with dark circles under his puffy eyes, already tired from eight hours of testimony behind closed doors the day before and awaiting a three-year prison term that begins this spring. Apologizing repeatedly to his family, Mr. Cohen portrayed himself as a broken man brought down by hubris, at one point choking up and wiping tears from his eyes at the mention of the effect on his daughter.
Through some five hours of nationally televised testimony, Mr. Cohen described his years working for Mr. Trump as a trip into a world of deceit in which the now-disbarred lawyer ignored his own conscience to get close to a magnetic person of power.
“Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” Mr. Cohen said. When he met Mr. Trump, he knew him as “a real estate giant and an icon” at the center of the action. “Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating,” he said.
In private business, Mr. Cohen said he rationalized Mr. Trump’s dishonesty as “trivial,” but as president, he said, “I consider it significant and dangerous.”
The president’s re-election campaign organization dismissed Mr. Cohen on Wednesday as a convicted perjurer who should not be trusted. “This is the same Michael Cohen who has admitted that he lied to Congress previously,” Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement. “Why did they even bother to swear him in this time?”
Republicans on the committee aggressively challenged Mr. Cohen along the same lines. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking Republican, called Mr. Cohen a “fraudster, cheat, convicted felon and, in two months, a federal inmate.”
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