I am here under oath to answer
the committee's questions truthfully
and to offer the American people what
I know about President Trump
Michael Cohen is a guy who is going to
prison in two months for lying
to Congress.
I don't believe that Michael Cohen is capable
of telling the truth.
You're a pathological liar.
I have lied.
But I am not a liar.
Michael Cohen's credibility was on trial
during his momentous hearing.
His testimony if believed could have
major implications to the Trump presidency.
He's only been threatened by the truth.
So how do we ourselves decide this proven
liar is telling the truth?
You can't. This is Professor
and author David Smith.
He literally wrote the book on lying.
I write on this kinda $%%$ all the time here.
So we decided to ask him how can we know for certain
if Cohen is telling the truth.
There is no objective foolproof way of
telling whether someone is lying
or not,
especially someone who's skilled in the art of impression
management by his own admission Michael
Cohen has lied for Donald Trump
for ten years.
He knows how to handle
impression management.
And someone very skilled in this craft could easily
pass say a polygraph test
or body language checks polygraph
detects stress
it doesn't detect lies.
There's no real science of body
language. Someone who seems calm
self-possessed and self-assured may
just be a very very good liar.
We can't place our
hopes in science delivering
a foolproof way of determining
whether or not someone is telling the truth.
So how do we ever know who's telling
the truth who's not?
Their word just isn't good enough.
We need evidence we need corroboration,
we need documentation.
Luckily for Cohen There's a lot of documentation
and providing the committee today
with several documents a copy of the
check Mr Trump wrote from his personal
bank account. Copies of financial statements
and copies of letters I wrote at Mr.
Trump's direction.
But even hard evidence can also be open to
interpretation scrutiny
and reasonable doubt.
Obviously Mr. Chairman,
the witnesses may produce documents suggest
incriminates the president.
Yet he lies to banks all of those
lies were done on fraudulent documents
documents that he
forged.
Nothing he says or produces has any
credibility.
Even something as objective as an audio recording
is subject to reasonable doubt,
making people question what they're hearing
and what they're seeing.
The fact is the president does bring up cash
but he says don't pay
with cash! Listen to the tape.
It says cash.
We live in a world where spin
and the media is pervasive people find
it difficult to know what to believe.
We are in search of the truth.
The president has made many statements of his own
and now the American people have a right
to hear the other side.
They can watch Mr. Cohen's testimony
and make their own judgment.
It turns out that judging for ourselves may
maybe the worst way to find the truth.
So some people think just go
with your gut.
Unfortunately that's a very treacherous
way of determining whether someone
is lying or not because it plays right into
confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret
evidence as confirmation of one's
existing beliefs.
So if you're the sort of person who wants
to see Donald Trump taken down
you're going to naturally be inclined
to give Michael Cohen
the benefit of the doubt.
Despite his track record.
By the same token if you're a fan
of Donald Trump then you
are going to be inclined to be very very
suspicious of the truthfulness
of Cohen's claims.
This force is so strong that we'll believe
just about anything to enforce our worldview
will even lie to ourselves.
And there may be no better example of this than
Cohen's testimony.
Replublican members of Congress used their time to discredit Cohen
based on his history of deception.
There's no truth with you whatsoever.
That's why.
That's important to you to look up here
and look at the old adage that our moms taught us-
liar liar pants on fire.
No one should ever listen you
and give you any credibility.
And Democrats thanked Cohen speaking the
truth regarding Trump.
You want to talk about an agenda?
My friends on the other side of the aisle refuse
to bring any of these people up before the committee.
So today for the first day we have
one witness who voluntarily
is coming forward to testify.
Your side ran away from the truth.
And were trying to bring it to the American people
when.
Our precious world views are under threat.
It's so easy for us to lie to
ourselves.
To form a false picture.
To let our biases take over.
As human beings were natural born liars.
We're all biased we're all self-serving we
all deceive ourselves
and only way that we can really guard
against this is to understand
that we are all vulnerable to self-deception.
The entire Trump presidency is on the line
with Cohen's testimony.
And regardless of his veracity it looks like this
hearing has done little more than push two opposing
worldviews deeper into the sand.