JOHN PODHORETZ: Cohen’s Testimony Actually Helped Trump.

It turns out his lawyer-fixer doesn’t have the goods.

Early reports on what Cohen might say suggested he was ­going to tell the committee that Trump told him to lie to Congress about his alleged porn-star payoffs. That would have meant the president had suborned perjury — a serious crime. Such testimony would indeed have amounted to a smoking cruise missile aimed directly at the White House.

But that is not what Cohen said.

This is what he said: “Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates. In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was ­actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing.” Cohen added: “In his way, he was telling me to lie.”

If a president is to be ­impeached when an associate says he intuited that the president wanted him to lie under oath, there is no president following Trump who wouldn’t be ­vulnerable to the same charge and to impeachment under the same standard.

That is why subornation of perjury has a high evidentiary standard and one that mustn’t be lowered just because liberals and Never Trumpers are determined to see Trump ­humiliated.

But as with lawyer/client confidentiality — which every Right-Thinking Person would be solemnly invoking here if the parties were reversed — no standard, however well-established, can survive contact with Trump Derangement Syndrome.