On Wednesday, Michael Cohen, the former lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, testified against his former boss before an open session of the House Oversight Committee. Cohen called the President “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat,” and provided evidence that Trump personally reimbursed him for hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen said that Trump, indirectly, “in his own way,” instructed him to lie to Congress about the timing of the Trump Tower project in Moscow, and that Trump “knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee e-mails.” (Stone has denied that they spoke about the matter.) Cohen, of course, is not a perfect witness: he has been sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, campaign-finance violations, and lying to Congress.

What did we learn today, and where does the Trump-Russia story stand after his testimony? To talk about all that, I spoke by phone with Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor of Lawfare. The following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

What was your biggest takeaway from the morning testimony?

Cohen did really well, honestly. I don’t know what I expected, or if I expected anything, but it was pretty striking to see the Republicans on the committee routinely try to discredit him, and he ran rings around them. Even when he would talk over them and push back against some of the implications they were making, they would shut up and let him keep talking. It was really an interesting power dynamic that I didn’t expect to see.

What takeaways did you have from the afternoon session?

What I was struck by is how careful Cohen has been in what he says Trump has and hasn’t done. The Republicans and Trump himself and his family members have really tried to push this idea of Cohen as someone who has been spurned, who’s out to get Trump, but there are plenty of questions where Democrats will ask whether Trump did such-and-such egregious thing and Cohen will actually say no. The main examples were congresswoman Jackie Speier’s questions about the National Enquirer story [which was never published] about a possible illegitimate child of Trump’s, and the rumor about Trump assaulting Melania in an elevator. And Cohen went out of his way, in both cases, to basically say he didn’t believe that they were true. I think that actually does a lot for him in terms of his credibility.

Maybe the biggest revelation today was that Cohen testified that the President’s legal team changed his previous congressional testimony. [Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, said in a statement that the claims were “completely false.”] If the testimony was false, would that be lawful?

That’s a really good question. I believe Cohen has said that he shared the prepared testimony with them, pursuant to a joint-defense agreement. As we all learned when the F.B.I. seized Michael Cohen’s documents, including some documents Trump said were privileged, there is such a thing as the crime-fraud exception, which means attorney-client privilege can be pierced if the lawyer is involved in criminal conduct. I don’t want to go as far as to say that that may have taken place here, but it is certainly not the case that, just because they are Trump’s lawyers, we will be shielded from ever finding out.

So if the Mueller team wanted to ask Trump’s lawyers about that, would they be able to do so?

I believe Trump’s lawyers would be able to put up a fight, but I can’t say whether they would be successful. But I imagine they would immediately point to attorney-client privilege, to not turn over that information.

And I suppose they could say they weren’t telling Cohen to lie but correcting the record, based on their understanding of it from Trump?

Sure, sure. They could certainly make the case that they didn’t understand Cohen to have been lying. Given the facts that we now know, that would seem to be the best case that they would have.

To take a step back—Mueller’s office must have cleared Cohen to testify. Why do you think they did that, and does it tell you anything about where their case is?

I did not expect him to talk about Russia at all, I have to say, and I was surprised to see the material about Roger Stone in his prepared statement. His comments about Donald Trump, Jr., murmuring to his father, potentially about the Trump Tower meeting, struck me as more speculative. But the Stone thing—saying that Stone was on speakerphone telling Trump about WikiLeaks—is potentially a really big deal.

Legally or politically?

Politically. I would have to go and look at the statutes, but it is too early to make a legal determination there. Politically speaking, if it is true, it is absolutely damaging, because it ties Trump directly to Stone’s efforts to contact WikiLeaks in a way we haven’t seen before.

The testimony today could very well be damning politically and legally for Trump. But does the testimony make you think that more extreme versions of a Russia conspiracy are not true?

It depends how you define what constitutes an extreme theory. It’s interesting that you say that, because my reaction to reading Cohen’s prepared statement was actually the opposite. I felt, like, Oh, right, this is a reminder of how big and how serious this is. In recent weeks, maybe because the investigation has been relatively quiet and there have been reports of it wrapping up, I felt like the mood has shifted toward wondering whether the report will be kind of a dud—that there wasn’t really collusion and there was just a disorganized effort that didn’t really come together.

The Cohen statement, on the other hand, seemed to me to be a splash of cold water. If he is telling the truth, it sounds like Trump really did know about Roger Stone’s alleged efforts to contact WikiLeaks and approved of them, and that strikes me as a lot more than a dud. It doesn’t corroborate the most explosive details of the Steele dossier—it is not the most extreme version—but it is pretty bad politically.

What have you made of the quality of the questions from the Democrats? Do you think they should bring in an outside person, as Republicans did with the Kavanaugh hearing?

I don’t want to point to the Kavanaugh hearing as an example of something that worked well, because I thought that experiment was pretty much a failure. But the Democrats have taken up a lot of time speechifying and not really digging in ways that they could. That’s not true across the board. But you can certainly see how someone with experience in questioning a witness would make better use of that time.

I can’t believe that no one asked what Trump’s attitude was when he was talking to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks. Did he act like he had heard about this before? Did he seem like he had talked to Roger Stone about this before?

Right. So, if you look at the time line, Cohen has said he thinks that that Stone call was July 18th or 19th, 2016, and the “Russia, If You Are Listening” speech is on July 27th, about ten days later. That is notable. I don’t want to draw any conclusions from it, because it could just be a kind of ambient awareness, but that time line seems impossible to ignore. Let’s put it that way.

Cohen is supposed to testify before Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, in a closed hearing, on Thursday. What would you like him to be asked?

I think it is important what words Trump used in giving Cohen the impression that he should lie to Congress. That may come up in an open hearing, but, in the space of a closed hearing, he will be able to answer that question with fewer concerns about impeding the investigation. I think that, given the dispute over what Trump told Cohen to do, and given what it would mean if Trump really did tell him to lie, the specific wording is very important.