Ben Wittes on Cohen Hearing: ‘You Really Do Have a Rich Terrain for Future Investigative Hearings’

EXCERPT:

WITTES: "I think the single most important thing, and you just said it, that you developed was a witness list. You know, one of the pints, whenever you’re doing a major investigative hearing, it’s whether that hearing gives you an agenda for the next case. And in this case they really quite effectively got Michael Cohen and I think he was very cooperative in this to identify a name — an additional name associated with a great many of the lines of inquiry that he described, a great many of the allegations that he made. He would tell sort of who else was in the room, who else was involved. And the result is that they come away with a very long list of people, some of whom you would expect, like Allen Weisselberg of the Trump Organization and David Pecker of AMI. The list gets pretty long and pretty granular of people that the committee will want to approach and hear from next. So as I was listening over the course of the day, I was just struck by how many other hearings this committee could map out, just based on Cohen’s testimony alone. And the final thing about that, of course, is that this hearing is only presumably a shadow of the story that Michael Cohen actually could tell because of course he spent Tuesday, the day before the hearing, in a day-long closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s going to spend today in a closed session with the House Intelligence Committee. So what was sandwiched in-between in public yesterday was only the part of his story that is ripe to be told in public. So I think if you put those two things together, you really do have a rich terrain for future investigative hearings."