Some Republican lawmakers admitted that if President Donald Trump did encourage his former personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, then it will change the dynamic for him. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Congress ‘Game changer’? Impeachment could hinge on whether Trump told Cohen to lie If true, legal experts say it's the clearest evidence yet that the president has committed a crime.

This time may be different.

Legal experts are calling a BuzzFeed report that President Donald Trump personally instructed his longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress the most clear-cut evidence yet that Donald Trump committed a crime — in this case, obstruction of justice. Some normally cautious Democrats are deploying the word “impeachment.” And even a few Republicans are conceding that the revelation would have serious ramifications if confirmed.


“I’ve been one of the guys holding back on impeachment chatter but I think this is a game changer,” said Julian Epstein, a chief counsel for House Judiciary Committee Democrats during the 1998-99 Bill Clinton impeachment fight.

In fairness, Trump faces several revelations each month that land with a splash, then recede into ripples.

In the last week alone, the president has weathered reports that the FBI once opened a counterintelligence investigation to determine if he was working on behalf of the Russians, and that he took away his interpreter’s notes after a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin — a highly unusual move for a commander in chief.

Trump has also maintained robust GOP support for months, even as he was implicated in an illegal hush money scheme, fired the FBI director who launched the investigation into his campaign and constantly changed his story about whether his campaign had any contact with Russian officials.

In sum, it’s 20 months into special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, and Trump is still standing.

But legal experts said the Buzzfeed report falls into another category entirely. The story , which cites two law enforcement officials involved in the investigation, claims Trump gave Cohen the order to give false testimony about negotiations for a Trump Tower in Moscow. And it says investigators have the documents and witnesses to prove it. That appears to meet the loosely defined “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” grounds for impeachment spelled out in the Constitution, lawyers said.

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Epstein, the former Democratic Judiciary Committee counsel, said that if strong corroborating evidence emerges that Trump induced Cohen to commit perjury “then you have a clear image of a mobster in the White House, and it’s very hard for me to see how the Republicans in the House can defend that.”

He also harkened back to his time on Capitol Hill during the Clinton impeachment fight, arguing that the GOP relied on a flimsier obstruction situation than the BuzzFeed story outline.

“They are strongly on record supporting impeachment with a much weaker evidentiary case on obstruction and suborning perjury two decades ago,” Epstein said.

For now, Republicans have remained mostly silent, with many bashing BuzzFeed — a site that got its start with animal pictures, listicles and pop culture quizzes, but has since developed a robust news operation. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani unambiguously denied the allegations, even as the White House said it wouldn’t dignify them with a direct response and pointed to Cohen’s sketchy financial history. Trump’s former attorney is scheduled to report to federal prison in early March to begin serving a three-year sentence for a series of tax fraud and lying charges.

“Lying to reduce his jail time!” the president said on Twitter.

“Today’s claims are just more made-up lies born of Michael Cohen’s malice and desperation, in an effort to reduce his sentence,” Giuliani said.

But some GOP lawmakers admitted that if the story is borne out, it will change the dynamic for Trump.

“We are waiting to see what’s true,” Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford told CNN, noting that if the president did direct Cohen to lie to lawmakers, “that’s a very big issue.”

All eyes will now be on Cohen’s scheduled trip to Capitol Hill on Feb. 7, when he’s expected to publicly testify before the House Oversight Committee in what’s guaranteed to be a gavel-to-gavel television spectacle.

It’s unclear whether Cohen will be able to go into greater detail on the allegations given the ongoing Mueller probe. And House Democrats have signaled they’ll try to be mindful of that. But the Cohen hearing itself is only going to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic leaders to begin the process of investigating whether Trump’s ouster is warranted.

“If he gives the kind of sworn testimony that he is signaling, Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi will be under enormous pressure to unleash a formal impeachment inquiry,” said Phil Lacovara, who served as a top counsel to the Watergate special prosecutors.

Pelosi has so far insisted she’d prefer to wait for Mueller to finish his work before kickstarting an impeachment inquiry. Given the requirement that two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict an impeached president, the California Democrat also has said she wants to see a significant number of Republicans give a signal they too are open to such proceedings.

“If and when the time comes for impeachment — it will have to be something that has such a crescendo in a bipartisan way,” Pelosi told CBS in an interview earlier this month.

Democratic leaders on Friday vowed to uncover the truth.

"We know that the President has engaged in a long pattern of obstruction,” House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter. “Directing a subordinate to lie to Congress is a federal crime.”

The committee’s job, he added, “is to get to the bottom of it, and we will do that work."

California Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is also putting his staffers on the case.

“Our committee is already working to secure additional witness testimony and documents related to the Trump Tower Moscow deal and other investigative matters,” Schiff said in a statement.

BuzzFeed’s report alleged that Mueller learned about Trump's instructions to Cohen “through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents.” It added that Cohen acknowledged Trump's instructions during his interviews with Mueller's team.

If these details hold, a former senior Justice Department official from the George W. Bush administration said Republicans may change their tune. But there has to be a proverbial smoking gun.

“Is there an email? Is this on one of the infamous tapes?” the former DOJ official asked. “If it’s he-said, he-said, I don’t think it’s enough.”

Several sources said Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department, William Barr, may have already painted himself into a corner during his testimony earlier this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. There, Barr explained that a president persuading a witness to commit perjury or change his or her testimony would constitute obstruction of justice.

Still, dating back to Richard Nixon’s tenure and up through the Clinton investigation, the DOJ has found that a sitting president can’t be indicted while in office. Trump’s lawyers have said publicly that Mueller told them he’ll be deferring to that legal finding. But Watergate prosecutor Lacovara told POLITICO that the special counsel could still press his DOJ supervisors to order up a new opinion based on the latest evidence.

“Barr might be in a tight spot to refuse such a request, since he said under oath that he views obstruction by the president as a ‘crime,’” he said.

Andrew Desiderio, Andrew Restuccia, Quint Forgey and Rebecca Morin contributed to this report.