If Trump did tell Cohen to lie to Congress, that's clearly an impeachable offense.

[Read through to the end for the big story behind the minor one about whether Trump told Cohen to lie to Congress.]

Thursday night Buzzfeed reported that one of their reporters had two sources (federal law enforcement officers) who told him that they have seen evidence, in the form of texts and emails, as well as verbal sources, that show President Trump telling his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress about when they ended the negotiations to build a Trump Tower Hotel in Moscow.

This came days after Trump's nominee for Attorney General had said, in response to questions in his Senate confirmation hearings that:  "If a president . . . suborns perjury or induces a witness to change testimony . . .  then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction."

This set in motion a frenzy of talk about impeachment, with pundits insisting that it was time to begin inquiries into whether there were grounds for impeachment of the president -- because, if true, this is a felony.  It was quite understandable that this would be the response to what sounded like direct evidence from insider, responsible sources -- albeit unnamed to the public.   Nevertheless the lead author of the Buzzfeed article is reputed to be scrupulously honest in his reporting.  He won a nomination for a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting a couple of years ago.

The day after the article was published, a statement was released from the special counsel's office saying that the "specific statements" in the report, as well as the "characterization of documents and testimony" in Buzzfeed's report "are not accurate."

This is vague enough to allow different interpretations.   Trump's defenders claim that this means the entire Buzzfeed report is false.   Others interpret it as only saying that the report is not entirely accurate.    In other words, Trump may still have instructed Cohen to lie to congress;  but they may not have all the documentation that is claimed.  We simply do not know at this point.

The rarity of any statement from Mueller's office gives this great weight.  Speculation suggests that Mueller and his team were concerned that the rush to begin impeachment based on this less that accurate report would be a great disservice to not only the president but to the country.   And they simply wanted to put the brakes on this rush to judgment.

To the interpretation that the report may be partly true -- in fact may be true in its most important fact, suborning perjury, and only inaccurate in details -- is added the fact that Trump has not denied that he told Cohen to lie;   nor has his PR attorney Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, Giuliani emerged the next day to say that discussions about a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow may have continued into November 2016, i.e. up until and maybe after the election.    That certainly contradicts what the president has previously said repeatedly -- that he had "no deals with Russia" and not even anything that might become a deal, "because we hadn't pursued a deal there."

So it's still worth considering what this could mean, if the basic claim turns out to be true:   that Donald Trump, as president of the United States, instructed his lawyer to lie in his testimony to a congressional committee about his business dealings with Russia, an adversarial foreign power, during the campaign to become president and after being elected to that office.

If so, then this would be evidence of "suborning perjury" -- inducing another person to lie when testifying under oath in a congressional hearing, which is a federal crime.

Of course, it is a much stronger case if there is the documentation claimed in Buzzfeed's reporting than if it is simply Michael Cohen's word, which Trump has already tried to dismiss by claiming that Cohen is a proven liar and that he is just lying more, in an attempt to reduce his three year jail sentence for lying.

Pundits have been quick to point out the ludicrous fallacy of lying to reduce your jail sentence.  The last thing you should do when you've been convicted of lying is to lie further.    But Trump never bothers to think through things like that.

Buzzfeed's editor continues to strongly endorse the story and its reporting accuracy, and he has called on the Mueller team to be specific about what they find inaccurate about the story.     The reporter has clarified that his two "law enforcement" sources are not part of Mueller's investigative team, which was the original assumption made by many and may have been part of the thinking that went into Mueller's decision to release the statement.

BUT  HERE  IS  THE  BIG  STORY 
WE  MUST  NOT  LOSE  SIGHT  OF:

Thanks to Natasha Bertrand, writer for The Atlantic for her making this point on MSNBC on Sunday evening.    As she so cogently reminded us:   These details should not obscure the larger story behind them.   Donald Trump was campaigning as the Republican nominee for the presidency while pursuing a huge business deal that Putin had to approve for it to go through;  and, at the same time, Putin was having the emails hacked in the campaign of Trump's opponent and releasing damaging information.  And what did Putin get in exchange?    Trump boasted that, if elected, he would remove the sanctions and tale the U.S. out of NATO -- probably the two top items on Putin's wish list, with NATO being the main deterrent to Russia's expansion into Europe.

 So the big question is:  what did Trump know, and when did he know it?

Well, we've now heard from Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani that discussions about the Trump Tower project in Moscow continued right up until, perhaps through, election day 2016.

I guess some day we'll find out what this was all about.

Ralph