Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Breaking: Manafort Found Guilty on 8 of 18 Counts, Cohen Pleads Guilty to 8 Counts
Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for candidate Donald Trump, was facing 18 criminal counts. The jury found him guilty on eight of the counts, which included five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury said that they could not reach consensus on 10 of the counts, so those were declared a mistrial.
At about the same time the Manafort verdict came in, Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight counts. He admitted that he paid a pornographic actress for her silence during the 2016 presidential campaign and pleaded guilty to multiple charges of bank and tax fraud.
JUST IN: Cohen tells court under oath that he violated campaign law *at the direction* of the candidate, Donald Trump; says he acted for the purpose of influencing the election, @CNN/@Reuters report.
— Mark Albert (@malbertnews) August 21, 2018
.
Published in General
Trump has a history of creating Non Disclosures(ND) with other, (lets call them, Paramours) before he ever announced for the election. There fore, a case can be made( indeed FCC regs make this allowance) that he would have made these ND payments as a matter of course,regardless of an election,ergo;there was no intent to affect the campaign/election.
I was born at night.
But I wasn’t born last night.
Make Levin was making just this claim.
“When the FEC wrote the regulation that says what constitutes campaign expenditures and what constitutes personal use, it rejected specifically the idea that a campaign expenditure was anything related to a campaign, and instead says it has to be something that exists only because of the campaign and solely for that reason”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/was_the_strange_language_in_michael_cohens_guilty_plea_a_setup.html
Andy McCarthy makes the opposite claim:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/what-to-make-of-the-cohen-plea-and-manafort-convictions/
He also notes the felony prosecution of Cohen for under $300,000 in contributions and the slap on the wrist for the Obama campaign for $2,000,000 in violations.
It appears that had Trump simply used Cohen as a middle man for payments out of Trump’s own pocket, there would have been no problem. Not too smart.
This is basically my read too. This doesn’t have to be a big deal if Trump handles it correctly.
But are we now required to conclude that Cohen “gave” Trump that much money? That would seem to be necessary for the money to be considered a contribution. This has probably been discussed but I’m still trying to get my arms around Cohen “donating” six figures to Trump.
Agreed, though there is a big part of me which thinks: it’s either a big deal or it isn’t – the substance of what happened is the same regardless of how it was handled in the past or how it’s spun now.
Short-term loans are also illegal under these statutes. It’s clear that this was done expressly to avoid anyone connecting it to Trump. The shell corporations, the leveraging of Cohen’s HELOC loan for the initial funds, the multiple agreements with fake names and side letters. It would all have been avoided if Trump just paid the woman off himself. Except that would have defeated the purpose as it would have made it easy to connect the payments to Trump’s affairs with these women.
It’s pretty clear to me that a crime was committed here, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal since the FEC seems to treat these sorts of violations as mere administrative violations with subsequent fines. As the old adage says: it’s not the crime, but the coverup that gets you. Trump would be well served in coming clean, offering to pay a fine “As President Obama did for a much bigger violation, so we can get back to making America great again!”. That would require him to put aside his ego for what is best for him in this situation. So…no chance in hell it will happen.
It’s a big deal if the FEC had a history of prosecuting these violations as the felonies they are, the record on that is mixed. They came down like a ton of bricks on D’Souza for a minor violation, while Obama skated with a fine for a fairly large (in money terms) violation. (I’m shocked aren’t you?) If this is treated as a Obama style violation, Trump could get out of this and even turn it to his advantage. Whatever you say about the man he’s funny and has a command of the theater of public speaking. He could make his opponents look like fools if he just admits to the mistake and offers to pay a tiny fine.
Are retainers or reimbursable expenses the same as short term loans? I see this kind of reimbursable or billed billable expense all the time on smaller and less seedy transactions. No one considers them to be short term loans; similarly accounts payable are not short term loans either.
Aside from that, I’m still not seeing why it must be considered a donation/loan to the campaign. Do candidates not have private interests during campaigns?
I read that too, and McCarthy is normally my go to guy on these issues.
My problem is the Cohen prosecution is simply too blatant a skeevy prosecutorial attempt to creatively reconjigger the law to fit into something, anything, in order to screw Trump. For instance, paying hush money has probably been around longer than the oldest profession itself, and I’m 57 and I’ve never heard of anyone being prosecuted much less pleading guilty to Federal elections violations for paying hush money …. No ones ever heard of it because it has never been prosecuted before, because it’s a very weak case to make and Federal prosecutors pride themselves on winning and they pad their winning percentage by not prosecuting weak cases. Moreover, Federal election violations are normally adjudicated by the campaign paying a fine to the FEC. In this instance the FEC has not even filed a complaint on the issue of Trump’s NDA agreements.
The kicker is I only discovered this morning that Cohen’s attorney negotiating Cohen’s plea deal is none other than Lanny Effing Davis who is all in on the notion that the NDA is federal elections felony ….. What attorney in their right mind would go on national television and offer up this type of information about their own client …. as much as many on both sides really dislike Trump (and trust me I get it) this is not how our justice system is supposed to operate no matter how much you want Trump out of office.
Well, the “retainer” was clearly a cover for the reimbursement of the payment to the two woman in question, it was clearly designated that way to obscure the reasons for the payment (again the coverup is what gets you.) That’s not a typical campaign expense. If there was a retainer in place before this happened then it might be easier to make this argument – but the retainer was put in place specifically to reimburse Cohen for the expenditure of paying the women. The fact that they rolled it into reimbursements for other actual campaign expenses (Tech Services – whatever that is) marks the payments to the women as campaign expenses.
Maybe. If it’s actually a violation. I’d like that settled first.
Well, he plead guilty to it, so either he’s the worst lawyer of all time, or there’s something there.
Maybe I’m missing some info here. Do we know that the reimbursements were billed to and paid by the campaign? I thought it was not campaign dollars spent on this.
Despite appearances, I’m not trying to be particularly dense, but, if this was a loan, the contribution would seem to be the interest value of the loan if paid back. There seems to an assumption here that the money came out of Cohen’s pocket without reimbursement. I find that difficult to believe based on what we know of Cohen. As far as the methodology, I suspect, but obviously don’t know, that this was Cohen being Cohen without instructions from Trump.
Sounds like Cohen had plenty of incentive to plead guilty on this (and to declare that he was directed to do it by Trump) in order to get favorable treatment on the much more serious charges of tax evasion and bank fraud. Or there’s something there, but until we know the actual details I’m not seeing it.
I think that everybody is missing the forest for the trees. Michael Cohen admitted to paying off a porn star and the 1998 Playboy Playmate of the Year a couple of weeks before the election. Given that W. lost a couple of points due to the revelation of a very old DUI the Friday before the election, I think that it is reasonable to conclude that if either of those affairs (while Melania was pregnant or had a brand new baby) would have swayed the election. This would argue that Trump, while the duly elected President, has a taint of being illegitimate.
Therefore…what?
There was nothing illegal about the payments per se. I’m not sure what “a taint of being illegitimate” means, but I’d certainly want more than we know to come close to that. Equating Bush’s DUI with Bush’s narrow victory with Trump’s narrow win is speculation upon speculation upon speculation.
If proven that Trump colluded with the Russians to invade Hillary’s campaign emails which were posted on Wikileaks, this would provide a moral justification for Trump’s removal.
That is premature. I will wait for the Mueller probe results. But I note that Trump is in substantially a worse situation than he was 24 hours ago.
How so?
An NDA contract, even though in this instance was sleazy and could very well have changed the voting result, is still entirely legal.
What is at issue is how the hush money was paid, and whether the payment should be considered a campaign contribution at all.
The SDNY prosecutors “to affect the election result” written into Cohen’s plea deal was a blatant political flourish having nothing to do with the law.
Was Cohen Trumps personal lawyer or a lawyer for the campaign?
Does anyone here agree that if
The basic Clinton Russia-collusion story is described in this opinion piece.
Bill Clinton got paid handsomely by Russian bankers in 2010. It came back to haunt the Clinton campaign in 2015 and in 2016, which is detailed in a Fox News story about how the Clinton campaign killed a Bloomberg.com story linking Hillary’s opposition to Russia sanctions to Bill’s speech. (Here’s the pathetic Snopes “fact check” which tries to question it.) I heard that there were phone calls with Putin as well. You can read about it here. Or here:
The 500K was just for a speech, right? Maybe. And maybe it’s also true that Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch only discussed grandkids and golf on the tarmac. Maybe it’s also true that the 30,000 deleted emails were about Chelsea’s wedding and yoga.
Ugh. Again with the Uranium One crap.
Yes, Fred. Again with the Uranium One crap. If U1 is crap, what is Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer?
You don’t get that “Possible Intent to Get Dirt on Hillary” is impeachable? Well, I’ll have to let someone better versed in the art of fabrication explain it to you.
The Natioal Review and New York Times have both had stories about this. It is not some crack pot conspiracy theory.
Putin is smart enough to meddle pointlessly in an election but not smart enough to bribe his way to more control of the Uranium market?