OK, so Mark Levin thinks this is legal BS, and I’m inclined to agree with him.
So, if this “crime” is not a crime, why is he copping a plea? Why would his legal team agree to it (assuming they’re competent, not necessarily a good assumption when it comes to Lanny Davis).
My guess is that they have him on a lot more serious stuff, so he was advised to accept this plea down in return for testimony against the president. The prosecutors knew they could never get an actual conviction for this “crime” with a jury, but now that he’s plead, they’ll claim, “See, he wouldn’t have copped a plea if he wasn’t guilty of this ‘crime,’ and the president did it, too!”
Thus providing additional impeachment fodder should the country be nuts enough to put Democrats back in power.
But funny thing, I recall a mid-term election in which the opposing party not only talked about impeachment, but actually did it, and took a beating at the polls. If I were Republicans, I’d be running non-stop campaign ads of loony, low-IQ Maxine screaming “Impeach, impeach, impeach!”
[Afternoon update]
Thoughts on this and Manafort from Andrew McCarthy and Mollie Hemingway, via Instapundit.
[Update a while later]
From an email list:
Lanny Davis, long time Clinton lawyer and fixer, approaches Michael Cohen. He says, “You hate Trump, me and my clients hate Trump, let’s work together. You are facing 30+ years and happen to be one of the least sympathetic defendants of all the people in Trump’s orbit. I’ll work with the prosecutors, who would much rather get something on Trump than on you, to get you only 3-5 years. All you have to do is plead guilty to something that is a little shaky, but implicates Trump. Do you think you could possibly find it within your moral wheelhouse to agree to such a deal?”
Sounds about right to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
Steve Bannon: “November is a referendum on impeachment.”
1. Levin is totally correct.
2. Unlike in Bill “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” Clinton’s case, I don’t trust the GOPe Senate to NOT hold a kangaroo hearing even if it was obvious from the start that they wouldn’t have the super-majority required to remove Trump from office for the non-crimes they’d impeach him over. All of which would only serve as further distractions against his agenda (which, of course, is the entire point).
So far, most of Trump’s winnings have been pretty quiet inside-baseball stuff which, if I didn’t know people inside the WH, I would have never heard about. It seems like most “big-ticket” items are likely to be goals for his second term — that’s just the reality now. In the meantime, need to hold the congress and keep “Brown Bernie/Bernadette” from taking over in 2020.
Can you let us in on a couple of those things he’s doing that we don’t know about?
It does seem like another case of prosecutorial over-charging resulting in getting a plea deal for some lesser charge.
Note, in his confession, Cohen now has two different opinions on what he knew about Trump Jr’s meeting with the Russian, and when he knew it. So he’s either lied in his confession or lied in his testimony to Congress. And the evidence that Trump supposedly committed a crime is part of this testimony.
To complete the farce, the judge in this case is Kimba Wood, who was almost Bill Clinton’s attorney general.
Let’s say that Trump was guilty of a campaign finance violation. Past Presidents and candidates have only been punished with fines.
Trump has a good case saying that paying the women was more about protecting his family than influencing the election. He already had the Access Hollywood tape come out and the Democrat paid something like a dozen women accuse him of sexual assault. Since those things didn’t damage him, it doesn’t stand to reason that a consensual sexual relationship with a stripper and playboy model would have prevented him from being elected. Another two women making accusations against Trump wouldn’t matter.
But wait there is more! Notice that none of the women the Democrats paid to accuse Trump got money from Trump but the two women he did have sex with did get a payout. From what is known publicly, there were no laws broken or coercion to force sex. Quite the opposite, Stormy’s story is one where she aggressively pursued Trump.
Trump at most paid two problem people in exchange for non-disclosure agreements, a contractual arrangement, to maintain his image for the election.
If that’s illegal, then paying a PR firm to develop an image campaign for someone running for office would also be illegal. There is no difference whatsoever. Both are “attempts to influence the outcome of an election” by entirely legal means.
You obviously didn’t get the news.
Everything is illegal if the right do it. Nothing is illegal if the left do it.
It’s The Law.
I bow before your SJW might….
NOT!
As much as I want to agree, I can’t. Paying a PR firm for a campaign purpose is a campaign expenditure. However, paying an individual for services unrelated to the campaign is not. A better analogy would be claiming Trump paying his lawn service is a campaign violation.
As far as I’m concerned, the Cohen plea deal is another example of prosecutorial over charging to get a deal the SDNY wanted. It should be meaningless, except that impeachment is a political act, not really a legal one.
An even better analogy would be Trump paying to get his teeth fixed so that he has a nice smile which is a helper in the campaign.
Yes, that is better.
Ahh, but if he did that then they would say it was misusing campaign funds for personal reasons and he should go straight to jail.
Oops! I should have scrolled down to read your comment before typing.
Almost. Paying a PR firm would be declared on your financial paperwork. The claim here is that the expense wasn’t declared.
The Hillary campaign declared the money spent on the law firm used as a cut out to hire Fusion GPS. She just lied about what the money was for in the documentation. This is OK because the FBI knew about it and used the information gathered through this paperwork error.
That everything that has arisen from the Mueller investigation started with Hillary and the DOJ breaking the rules hardly matters.
Personally, I think that *if* Cohen’s version is true, Trump is guilty. Here’s why, and more importantly, what, he’s guilty of;
Trump wanted to hide the origin (himself) of the funds used to pay off the women with whom he had alleged affairs. So, he and his lawyer set up a deal to obfuscate it; Cohen fronted the money from sources unknown, Trump paid him back. This caused Cohen to commit bank fraud by falsifying a loan application.
First, the bank fraud. Why would Trump go along with that? I rather doubt he would (unneeded risk). My guess is he didn’t know. I’ll further guess that Cohen had access to some discretionary funds of Trump’s, and Trump assumed the money was coming from that. However, the money wasn’t there, so Cohen had to hustle to raise it quick. Now why might the money not be there when Trump thinks it is? My guess, embezzlement. And that’s why the tapes; so Cohen has leverage when Trump finds out and comes after him.
But, putting all that aside, I mentioned Trump’s guilt, which is in this case bribery. President Trump, defacto, took a bribe from the ultimate source of those funds, a guy named Donald J. Trump. Yes, he done bribed himself, via using his money for campaign purposes (assuming that was his motive… if that wasn’t his motive, he’s totally in the clear).
Trump may well also be stone cold guilty of being a victim of embezzlement and extortion, but I’ll get into that one another day.
The allegations against Cohen involved large sums of money. You would think a guy dealing in tens of millions of dollars wouldn’t have any problem coming up with the paltry sum (by comparison) paid these women. I didn’t look but how big was the loan he got to pay off the women and was he paid a retainer by Trump?
If the loan was larger than the payments and he was paid a retainer by Trump, where did the extra money go and why wouldn’t he just claim that he paid the women with the retainer money?
He said what he was told to say to get a lighter sentence. If they told him to admit to a hit and run accident, despite no evidence of a damaged vehicle for which he was driving, that would give him only 2 years in prison; he would have admitted to it too.