Fox host Sandra Smith quickly ended her interview with Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo after he told Fox News viewers that last night’s BuzzFeed bombshell report that Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress could be a “smoking gun” that is “much more serious” than Watergate.
Yoo appeared on Fox’s America’s Newsroom program today to discuss the BuzzFeed report that dominated the morning news shows, except on Fox & Friends.
Yoo, who gained infamy by writing the Bush torture memos, is now a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. So while he’s probably not a big Trump lover, he’s no bleeding-heart liberal.
Before hearing from Yoo, anchor Sandra Smith played a clip of Trump daughter-in-law and 2020 campaign adviser Lara Trump calling the report “ridiculous” and calling Michael Cohen “a fraud” trying to get his “last couple minutes of fame.” However, Lara Trump was not seen denying any of the specific allegations in the report.
Yoo agreed that Cohen has “severe credibility problems.” But then he delivered his devastating legal analysis:
YOO: But suppose it’s true. This could be the smoking gun that Trump’s critics have been looking for. You recall that back in the day when President Clinton was impeached, the ground for that impeachment was perjuring himself but also trying to suborn perjury, exactly what Trump is accused of doing here. And this is something that happened while Trump was president. This is not something he did before, during the campaign.
The attorney general-to-be, Bill Barr, testified before the Senate, I think quite correctly, that a president who tries to get people to lie to federal law enforcement or to Congress, are committing a crime that could be investigated, that is obstruction of justice and you may recall that was also one of the grounds that was given for the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. So this is actually much more serious, I think than what we’ve seen in the past…
You’d think that “objective” anchor Smith would have had a number of questions for Yoo about what he had just said. But no, she interrupted and talked over him so we never heard why this is much more serious than Nixon’s Watergate. “Well, at this point, it’s just one report,” she said dismissively. “It cites two individuals in that report so we’ll see what else comes of that, if anything.”
Then she quickly ended the interview.
Watch the bad news for Trump below, from the January 18, 2019 America’s Newsroom.