Just hours after Michael Cohen opted to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Donald Trump was ready with a comeback, telling reporters of Cohen, “I would say he’s been threatened by the truth.” On Thursday morning, he followed up with a tweet drawing a parallel between Cohen and Hillary Clinton, writing, “So interesting that bad lawyer Michael Cohen, who sadly will not be testifying before Congress, is using the lawyer of Crooked Hillary Clinton to represent him - Gee, how did that happen? Remember July 4th weekend when Crooked went before FBI & wasn’t sworn in, no tape, nothing?” (Never mind that Trump has his own Clinton lawyer serving as his acting White House counsel.)

Ironically, it was Trump’s threats, along with those of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that Cohen cited in his decision to back out of testifying in the first place. As my colleague Emily Jane Fox reported on Wednesday, Cohen said he was concerned for his own safety and the well-being of his family after several tweets by the president (last year, Trump tweeted that Cohen ought to serve a “full and complete sentence” for “all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things” he had done), not to mention Trump’s phone call into Fox News wherein he cast aspersions on Cohen’s father-in-law. Giuliani continued the drum beat over the weekend, suggesting on CNN’s State of the Union that Cohen was cooperating with law enforcement to protect his father-in-law, who he alleged had ties to organized crime in Ukraine. “He goes and testifies against some people that are possibly in organized crime, they ain’t going to be applauding for him when he goes into a restaurant in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, believe me,” Giuliani said.

Reps. Elijah Cummings and Adam Schiff, who chair the House Oversight and Intelligence committees, respectively, released a joint statement saying they “understand” Cohen’s position, and have offered to work with him to ensure security meets his standards, but added that, for Cohen, “not appearing before Congress was never an option.” The Senate Intelligence Committee also has subpoenaed Cohen, according to his lawyer, Lanny Davis. When he does testify, Democrats will have plenty to ask him about. Since he was sentenced to prison in December for tax fraud and lying to investigators, reports have emerged that Cohen not only discussed plans for a Trump Tower Moscow during the height of the presidential campaign in 2016, but paid someone to rig online polls for Trump in 2015, and was reportedly directed to lie to Congress by Trump himself. (The last allegation, reported by BuzzFeed News, was thrown into question after Robert Mueller issued a carefully worded denial of some elements of the story.)

In the meantime, Cohen’s team is keeping pressure on the president. “Let me be very clear: the House of Representatives now has an obligation—a resolution of censure, when the president of the United States indisputably intimidates and obstructs justice to prevent a witness from testifying, is in order,” Davis argued on Good Morning America on Thursday. “So is a federal criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani for witness tampering. Calling out a man’s father-in-law and wife in order to intimidate the witness is not fair game.”

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