But if Cohen, who was Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer for a decade, and is now cooperating with the special counsel’s inquiry, was really as woefully lacking in credibility as Republicans claim, then why wouldn’t their House Oversight Committee members also be using all their time interrogating the specific claims that Cohen is making about Trump himself?

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After all, by their own lights, you can’t believe anything Cohen says. And this is the best — and probably only — chance they’ll have to go one-on-one with Cohen. So why not grab on to this unique chance to demonstrate for the whole world to see that Cohen’s many allegations also can’t be believed?

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One after another, Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing attacked Cohen’s credibility in every conceivable way they could. They pointed to his long history of duplicity, browbeating, bullying and threats (never mind that a good deal of this was on behalf of Trump himself) and claimed that Cohen was really setting himself up for a lucrative TV career after all this is over.

But ask yourself this: How much time did they spend cross-examining Cohen about the many substantive claims he made in his testimony?

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Consider some of the big revelations of the day. Cohen alleged that he overheard Trump on a phone call with Roger Stone, who gave him a heads-up on a coming Wikileaks email dump. At the hearing, Cohen elaborated, claiming he’d overheard this conversation on speaker phone. He even said that he believed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III may have corroborating information about this.

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I cannot recall any serious effort by Republicans to cross-examine Cohen about these matters — say, by quizzing on specifics to try to catch him in an inconsistency.

Cohen also flatly declared that he was given 11 checks from Trump himself, or from an account controlled by Trump, to reimburse Cohen for the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, which appear to be at the core of a criminal conspiracy. Cohen also said Donald Trump Jr. signed one check, and that Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was in the room while Trump discussed this conspiracy.

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I cannot recall any serious effort by Republicans to cross-examine Cohen about those things, either.

Cohen also said Trump’s lawyers edited his original statement to Congress — in which he falsified the timeline of negotiations over Trump’s Moscow project, leading him to plead guilty — to change its “message” about that timeline. In fairness, Democrats were not able to draw out too much about this, and it’s still crying out for more explanation. But Republicans did not spend much time on this topic, either.

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Republicans also spent very little time pressing Cohen on a claim that you might think he’d actually be very vulnerable on: The assertion that Trump communicated to him that he should lie about the Moscow project without saying so. This is a hard claim to defend on its face, so you’d think Republicans would be all over it. But they weren’t, at least not much.

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One Republican committee member — Rep. Greg Steube of Florida — did press on this a bit. But he then drifted into an insane line of inquiry, pressing Cohen on whether those 11 checks actually were for reimbursing hush-money payments. This is odd, since Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has conceded that Trump did reimburse that money.

Republicans spent all their time impugning Cohen’s credibility, while showing virtually no interest in learning anything about the explosive allegations Cohen made. As Brian Beutler says, there is a sinister dimension to this:

But the other side of this coin is that they didn’t make any serious efforts to actually shoot the allegations down.

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It’s not difficult to see why: The problem for Republicans is that many of Cohen’s core claims are verifiable in one way or another. Either there are 11 checks from Trump’s accounts reimbursing the hush money, or there aren’t (Cohen has vowed to turn them over to Congress). Either Weisselberg was in the room with Trump discussing the hush-money scheme, or he wasn’t (he was granted immunity, and has surely testified to this point already).

This is why Republicans were forced to resort to their other play of the day, claiming that the fact that the hearing is taking place at all is a travesty of justice, because — and note the boomerang logic here — Cohen is (again) a proven serial liar, so why are we wasting time hearing from him at all? Needless to say, Republicans couldn’t treat this hearing as an opportunity to shed more light on what he’s actually claiming.

Of course, there was no need to go hard at the specifics, because the more lurid and outsize claims are guaranteed to bring in right-wing media adulation.

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Indeed, two of the Republicans at the hearing — Reps. Mark Meadows (N.C.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) — have specialized in making particularly wild claims about the Russia investigation, and, as Politico recently reported, this has led Trump to single them out by name as “warriors," which has rocketed them to stardom in the right-wing media ecosystem.

But this also shows how the incentives dictated by the Republican closed information feedback loop sometimes work against the GOP cause.

The failure to show any serious interest at all in the allegations against Trump is, of course, a startling abdication of responsibility, given their gravity. But Republicans didn’t even use the hearing as an occasion to examine Cohen’s claims in a manner that might benefit Trump, at least outside the right-wing media audience. So this also stands a demonstration of the weakness of their position — and, by extension, that of Trump himself.

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