House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has vamped up his investigation of President Trump with the hire of a former federal prosecutor and MSNBC analyst who has already determined that Trump committed numerous felonies.
Daniel Goldman, who served as assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, will oversee the Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Trump, according to NBC News.
Goldman joined NBC and MSNBC as a legal analyst after leaving the government in 2017.
As a pundit, Goldman has made his thoughts about Trump clear, repeatedly asserting, without evidence, that Trump and his campaign associates colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.
“We already now know that the president has committed a felony in order to obtain the office of the presidency,” he said in a Dec. 14, 2018 segment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Goldman was seemingly referring to the case involving Michael Cohen, the former Trump attorney who pleaded guilty to several crimes, including making illegal campaign contributions in the form of payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump is identified in court filings in that case as “Individual-1.” Cohen has claimed that Trump directed him to make payments to Daniels in October 2016 in order to keep her from revealing an affair she had with Trump in 2006.
Goldman also endorsed a now-debunked McClatchy report as evidence of “collusion!!” with Russia.
The article cited by Goldman claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has received evidence that Cohen’s cell phone pinged off of a tower near Prague. If true, the story would have seemingly verified claims made in the Steele dossier. Cohen is accused in that report of meeting in Prague in August 2016 with Kremlin officials to pay off Russian hackers.
But in congressional testimony last Wednesday, Cohen said that he had never been to Prague or the Czech Republic. He disputed other claims made about him in the dossier during a closed-door deposition with the House Intelligence panel on Thursday.
Schiff has said that he is expanding an investigation into possible collusion, as well as into whether Trump’s business dealings opened him up to being compromised by foreign governments. The investigation will focus heavily on Trump’s finances.
Republicans on the committee released a report on April 28 that found no evidence of collusion. California Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the committee, led an investigation into the FBI’s handling of the dossier.