Cohen's lie was simply to 'move back the date' of the end of the discussions from August, to mid Spring.
It was a campaign kind of lie, a lie of perceptions.
Cohen et. al. wanted to simply make it clear that the 'end of Russia discussions' was well before the nomination, and not near to it, purely for optics.
That's why it's an utterly stupid thing to do.
It was a stupid, needless like, just to avoid some possible bad news, that Cohen is going to go to jail for.
To me - this summarizes most of the Trump shenanigans: Trump and his crew of clowns do not have the sophistication to orchestrate anything with Russia!
Trump is 'just a guy'. He has a few family members, who are not professionals, help him out with stuff. This is not a 'operationalized, rigorous entity'. It's not like a bank, with policies, procedures, professional managers.
It's just a loud-mouth real-estate guy 'making deals' over the phone.
That's it.
I do not trust Trump one big, and it's good there is added scrutiny, and absolutely 100% the Russians will try to take advantage of Trump - in the same way they would try to take advantage of any president if they could.
But there's no attempt to undermine America, to do secret deals with Russian intelligence, no exchanging of secret information to alter the campaign. None of this.
Trump I think is a bad statesmen, who as a little to close to Russia for comfort, but there's no real smoking gun here, just a little bit of 'Cheech and Chong'.