A lot of Americans late on Thursday night and into the wee hours of Friday morning were googling terms like “impeachment,” and “suborning perjury,” immediately upon the publishing by Buzzfeed of a bombshell story.
In short, President Donald Trump directed his personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. That, if proven true, is suborning perjury, an impeachable offense, according to legal experts.
The Buzzfeed story, “President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project,” was published at 10:11 PM ET Thursday night.
It spread quickly, despite the late hour, with many Americans turning to Google, likely to verify their instincts, or to understand what they were hearing on the news.
Clearly, this is a story that has woken many people up.
For example, here’s Google’s chart on “suborning perjury,” over the past 24 hours:
That first spike was at 10:44 PM, about a half hour after the Buzzfeed piece was published.
And here’s Google’s chart for impeachment, which is a pretty active search term. Here’s the chart over the past 7 days. The second-highest spike is at 11 PM Thursday night, the first is 9 AM Friday morning:
And here’s “lying to Congress” over the past 24 hours. The first large spike is 10:44 PM ET:
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