[<<The conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman, guilty plea of his former personal lawyer and indictment of a leading congressional supporter raise Trump’s risks. ... The sheer force of the Manafort and Cohen stories breaking nearly simultaneously left an unavoidable impression that the walls are closing in on President Donald Trump.>>
(Excerpted from sl. no. I. below.)] I/II. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/21/trump-cohen-manafort-impeachment-legal-791009 ‘It’s the only excuse they’ll need’: Legal blows fuel impeachment fears The conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman, guilty plea of his former personal lawyer and indictment of a leading congressional supporter raise Trump’s risks. By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO, ANDREW RESTUCCIA, NANCY COOK and DANIEL LIPPMAN 08/21/2018 08:16 PM EDT Donald Trump. The sheer force of the Manafort and Cohen stories breaking nearly simultaneously left an unavoidable impression that the walls are closing in on President Donald Trump. | Minh Hoang/AP Photo President Donald Trump and his allies were armed with a quick response to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s guilty verdict – it had nothing to do with Russian collusion, and nothing to do with Trump. But Michael Cohen’s simultaneous bombshell guilty plea on Tuesday, in which he admitted paying hush money to women just before the 2016 election at Trump’s direction, poses a greater risk to the president. “The verdict in the Manafort trial isn’t nearly as worrisome to me as the Cohen agreement and the Cohen statement,” said former Trump adviser Michael Caputo. “It’s probably the worst thing so far in this whole investigation stage of the presidency.” One Republican lawyer close to the White House worried that Cohen – with his unique access to Trump’s history of business dealings and scandalous personal entanglements – could ultimately prove more damaging to Trump, and give Democrats fodder for impeachment if they take the House in November. “It’s the only excuse they’ll need,” the lawyer said. “And believe me, they won’t need much of an excuse.” The sheer force of the two stories breaking within minutes of each other left an unavoidable impression that the walls are closing in on a president facing serious accusations of wrongdoing, leaving some to worry what Trump will do next. One former administration official said there’s a “very high” likelihood that the president – who increasingly feels under attack from all sides – will do something erratic that could make an already bad situation worse. The Manafort and Cohen news came after an already difficult week for the president, who was also grappling with a blockbuster story in The New York Times revealing that Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn, is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, fearing that he was being set up to take the fall for any acts of obstruction. On Tuesday, a grand jury also indicted California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, one of Trump’s first two congressional endorsers, on charges of improperly using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses, including vacations and dental work. Earlier this month, Trump’s other earliest endorser, New York Republican Rep. Chris Collins, was charged with securities fraud. He’s pleaded not guilty. Trump sought to minimize the impact of the negative news and cast the developments as irrelevant to his presidency, while also again questioning the web of investigations stemming from Mueller’s probe. “This has nothing to do with Russian collusion,” Trump told reporters Tuesday on his way to an event in West Virginia. “This is a witch hunt, and it’s a disgrace.” But nearly a dozen people close to the president, including current and former White House aides, acknowledged that Tuesday was one of the darkest days of Trump’s year and a half in office. And they worried that the revelations – even if they are unrelated to allegations of collusion with Russia – could lend new credence to the Mueller probe, even after the president’s allies spent months undercutting public faith in the investigation. “There was political momentum building to wrap up the Mueller probe soon,” the former administration official said. “At the very least, in the short term, these two developments will pretty significantly bolster the office of the special counsel and people’s perceptions of it.” The prospect of an impeachment attempt by Democrats has increasingly been on the mind of many in Trump’s inner circle, who have used the threat as a rallying call to rally Republican voters ahead of the midterms. Some close to the president have even argued that a partisan impeachment effort could be a good thing for Trump’s re-election prospects in 2020. But Tuesday’s blockbuster news made the impeachment threat more real than ever. “This just underscores the importance of the midterms and keeping the house,” a Republican close to the White House said. “If Nancy Pelosi is speaker, Donald Trump will face impeachment.” Pelosi, the House minority leader, issued a firm statement on Tuesday criticizing Trump, but she -- like many other top congressional Democrats -- did not mention impeachment. “Cohen’s admission of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money ‘at the direction of the candidate’ to influence the 2016 election shows the president’s claims of ignorance to be far from accurate, and places him in even greater legal jeopardy,” Pelosi said in the statement. Prosecutor: Michael Cohen paid hush money at candidate Trump’s direction Cohen says he paid hush money at candidate Trump’s direction By JOSH GERSTEIN, LAURA NAHMIAS and JOSH MEYER Many of the president’s allies have believed in recent weeks that he was winning the public relations war against Mueller – even if they anguished in private about what the special counsel has up his sleeve. Trump’s supporters regularly point to polling showing that the majority of Americans view the investigation unfavorably, crediting Trump’s Twitter war against the probe with turning public sentiment. “Trump has done a good job of defining and setting the political knife fight on his terms,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. Trump, for his part, has long been shaken by Cohen’s decision to turn on him. Cohen’s plea deal, the culmination of the slow-motion public split from his longtime patron that began with an FBI raid on his Manhattan office in April, has hit close to home for Trump. Cohen admitted on Tuesday to evading taxes and making false statements – and to making illicit campaign contributions in the form of hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal to silence their claims of affairs with Trump. Cohen, who initially claimed he paid the money using a line of credit, said in a statement to prosecutors that he paid the money at Trump’s direction. “I participated in the conduct for the purposes of influencing the election,” Cohen said in court. For months, Trump’s allies have worried about what Cohen might fork over to Mueller. Those fears were only compounded when Cohen’s lawyer earlier this month released a tape of Trump during the campaign discussing the logistics of making payments aimed at keeping quiet allegations by McDougal that she had an affair with Trump. “It certainly gives the Democrats, should they win the House of Representatives, a serious piece of evidence to enter into articles of impeachment,” said Mark Corallo, a former Bush administration Justice Department spokesman who served as the spokesman for the president’s personal legal team before resigning over disputes on strategy. “When you can say that the president directed someone to break the law that’s a problem. That’s a big problem.” Manafort 'disappointed' at verdict MANAFORT TRIAL Manafort found guilty on eight counts By JOSH GERSTEIN, DARREN SAMUELSOHN and BEN SCHRECKINGER Cohen’s plea agreement didn’t explicitly include cooperation with authorities, but didn’t preclude eventually doing so either. Cohen and his team have repeatedly signaled publicly that he is willing to cooperate in a bid to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. In the immediate aftermath of the Cohen and Manafort news, Trump’s White House aides largely remained silent, letting the president speak for himself. As Trump headed out for a rally in West Virginia, his top surrogates had yet to receive talking points on the Manafort verdict in Virginia or Cohen’s plea agreement in New York. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to answer questions, directing reporters to the president’s own comments and to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Trump, during his brief remarks to reporters, ignored the Cohen news, focusing on Manafort. While jurors convicted Manafort on tax charges, they deadlocked on ten other counts of bank fraud. Giuliani, who has called Cohen a liar, said in a statement: “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen. It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.” Trump has repeatedly raged in public that the charges against Manafort were unfair, arguing the federal government treated his former campaign chairman worse than the infamous Chicago gangster Al “Scarface” Capone. Aides had planned for the president to use an exoneration to discredit the Mueller investigation. Russia investigation All the people connected to the Russia probes By DARREN SAMUELSOHN, SARAH FROSTENSON and JEREMY C.F. LIN White House staffers were quick to point out that the charges against the former campaign manager weren’t directly related to the president and the broader question of colluding with Russia. “It has nothing to do with us,” said one White House aide. One former Trump campaign official said senior level people close to Trump weren’t worried about larger ramifications from Cohen’s plea deal, which expose him to as much as five years of jail time. “When you talk to the JV team, the young kids are more susceptible to the media narrative about it, but senior people tend to think that if Cohen made that statement in court, why wasn’t he able to get a deal?” this person said. “You have Cohen’s word against Trump’s word, but it looks like Cohen’s word does not have enough credibility to get a deal, let alone to impeach.” Other officials described aides nudging the president’s attention toward his jam-packed midterm schedule that calls for 40 days of campaign travel, including the Tuesday night rally. A person familiar with the president’s thinking said the first round of travel will take him to Nevada, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee. “The main strategy is making sure to minimize the amount of self-harm the president is doing to himself just because it seems like right now his tweets and his actions aren’t exactly things that would help him in a court case or investigations into his behavior,” said one former White House official. Approaches they’ve used to persuade Trump to ignore Russia-related news stories include “getting him out to play golf or holding events that put him in a better headspace,” said the former official – including at campaign rallies. “He’s almost like a volcano, which sometimes blows off steam without taking out the village below,” this person added. “The busier he is, the less likely he’s going to get in these moods and watch TV and get more and more angry.” Eliana Johnson and Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report. II. https://www.lawfareblog.com/michael-cohen-plea-agreement-possible-meanings-campaign-finance-counts Michael Cohen Plea Agreement: Possible Meanings of the Campaign Finance Counts By Bob Bauer Tuesday, August 21, 2018, 8:28 PM Wikimedia Commons/IowaPolitics.com The government has now answered the question of whether it will convert the controversies over Michael Cohen’s payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal into a criminal case. Along with charges of tax and bank fraud, the president’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to two counts of violating federal campaign finance law in coordinating those payments. Previous reporting had indicated that Cohen arranged for payments to Daniels (the adult-film actress whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) and McDougal to prevent news of their past relationships with Donald Trump from breaking during the 2016 campaign—and that he may or may not have been reimbursed for those payments by Trump or organizations affiliated with him. Now Cohen has admitted that his actions resulted in illegal campaign financing—individual contributions exceeding the lawful limits and illegal corporate funding. Support Lawfare It was not certain that prosecutors would bring charges against Cohen for these payments. Except for the most clear-cut violations, like those involving “straw donations” that contributors channel to campaigns in the name of others, prosecutors tend to shy away from criminal campaign finance enforcement. The sort of payments at issue in the Daniels and McDougal matters can present tricky issues of motive: How much was Trump moved to silence these women to spare himself personal as well as political pain? Only a motivation materially if not wholly shaped by political objectives would implicate federal campaign finance law in a situation like this. A different but similar case against vice presidential candidate John Edwards failed to win over a jury. Edwards sought to conceal an affair and the child that it produced, and in making covert arrangements for their support, he accepted substantial financial assistance from two staunch political allies. The government sought to prosecute him for receiving excessive and unreported contributions but could not procure a conviction. With the Cohen testimony, prosecutors would have good reason to believe that this case is far stronger than the one brought against Edwards. The Edwards trial was notable for the absence of two key witnesses: the Edwards political supporters who financed the scheme of concealment and support for his lover and their child. One witness was dead and the other, at age 101, was unable to testify at trial. In this case, the key witness is talking: His statement to the court Tuesday included the admission that in arranging these payments, he had acted “in coordination with” and “at the direction of … a candidate for federal office.” Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis then confirmed on Twitter that his client had “testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime.” Together with other evidence, such as the timing of the payments, Cohen’s plea transforms a potentially difficult case about motive into a solid bet for the prosecution. Of course, in a case involving massive alleged financial and tax fraud, there is still the question of why prosecutors troubled themselves with campaign finance violations. The amounts spent represent a sliver of the total spent on the campaign. According to court documents, Trump or those close to him eventually reimbursed Cohen for the payments; the candidate did not call on donors to put up the money. Prosecutors by and large would not consider violations of this nature—involving hush money to hide affairs—to be “heartland” offenses of a law designed to redress the evils of big money in politics. What distinguishes this case and the decision to pursue the plea is that the candidate behind the subterfuge is the sitting president of the United States. Michael Cohen pleaded Tuesday to a charge that is compelling only because of the story he has to tell, along with other evidence, about the way that Donald Trump operates. And this is not so much about Trump’s clumsy steps, in violation of campaign finance law, to prevent exposure of philandering. This episode, assuming in the instance the form of campaign finance law violations, is about the most powerful man in the country—whom prosecutors have observed displaying contempt for legal considerations and constraints, and consistently lying about his actions. While the Daniels matter is fairly straightforward—hush money to conceal an affair—the McDougal case is a still-more-elaborate subterfuge entailing a “catch and kill” arrangement by a friendly media company to buy McDougal’s public silence with cash and a disingenuous promise of space for her own writing. As the plea agreement makes clear, this is a count involving third-party corporate contributions, not just the candidate’s personal resources. Cohen may have much to say about how this scheme was hatched, but he stated that it took place at the president’s direction. The criminal information filed Tuesday in the Cohen matters lays out the steps the Trump Organization and Cohen took to falsify documentation to cover the reimbursements he received for his hush-money expenses. The degree to which Donald Trump also directed these activities, or took other actions behind the scenes to encourage Cohen and other witnesses in a course of dishonesty and fraudulent conduct, remains to be seen. How the case develops from here is not possible to judge at this time, but the Cohen campaign-finance plea resonates unmistakably with the special counsel investigation, which also concerns what a candidate is prepared to do to win an election and then cover his tracks. The criminal information cites the involvement of unnamed members of the Trump campaign; the campaign, like the candidate, is now clearly in separate legal jeopardy. The similarities between Trump’s problems and those of Richard Nixon continue to grow. In the short term, should there be any doubt about Trump's unwillingness to sit for an interview with prosecutors, this seems yet another reason why he had no intention to do so. His lawyers will busily attack Cohen, as they have already begun to do, but they do not know what he has told prosecutors or what evidence he has supplied to back up his claims. Any interview with the president would touch on these issues, among others—and the president whose lawyer has proclaimed that "truth is not truth" and who repeatedly rails about “perjury traps” is surely not able to take his chances with his own version of the Daniels and McDougal tales. This is another possibility raised by the Cohen plea. It may not matter whether the president agrees to testify. Others seem prepared to bear that burden. As Nixon found when one of his lawyers also became a witness for the government, this can be the beginning of very hard times. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
