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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
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Published in General
Not “fake news.”
Truth is truth.
Lesson learned. Don’t participate in the public process.
Michael Cohen says that he violated campaign finance law at the direction of the candidate. He does not say which candidate.
Lock her up!
Lock ’em both up!
So maybe character does matter.
Or, don’t sleep with skeevy porn stars and try to buy their silence with shady NDAs during a Presidential Campaign?
It was always obvious Trump had an affair with a porn actress (among others).
It was always obvious Trump paid(via fixer Cohen) the porn actress hush money to stay quiet before the election.
It was always obvious the porn actress (via her sleazy porn lawyer) realized she had agreed to a incredibly bad deal(she could have been a millionaire!) after Trump astonishingly won the election.
The problem is Trump can legally contract to pay an individual to not publicly expose their extramarital affair.
Campaign finance violation to influence an election???? Good luck with that ….
We might be revisiting many historic elections to find this level sleaziness is actually not that uncommon at all.
So now that Move On has been appropriated by the Trump crowd how long before they start asking “At this point what difference does it make?”
Only the best people…
So a question for the lawyers if you break the law under the direction of your boss is that not a conspiracy between you two? Is Trump then also not guilty of conspiring to break camapaign finance law?
My friends Michael Avenati will be our next president. It will be amazing.
Flynn, Manafort, Cohen…it’s almost like Trump surrounded himself with crooks.
Break which law? The fact that Cohen paid the porn actress to sign an NDA was never in dispute nor is it illegal.
Cohen is now saying he arranged the NDA under the direction of Trump which to me was always apparent, and Trump denying his knowledge of the NDA with the porn actress was always highly unlikely.
Squeezing all this normally legal sleaze into a campaign finance violation seems like a stretch, but I guess we’ll see.
Cohen’s statement was that he broke the law at the direction of the candidate. Campaign finance violations are pretty common though, Obama did it and received a fine. Trump’s campaign should probably be fined over this and we can all move on.
Clinton settled with Paula Jones while he was President for 800k.
There are allegations that Joe Kennedy offered Jacqueline money to stay married to JFK despite his stepping out.
LBJ directed the FBI to spy on the Goldwater campaign.
After Woodrow Wilson had a massive stroke, his doctors and the White House conspired to keep his condition a secret. His wife Edith was de facto President for the remainder of his term.
Sleazeballs, all of them. Next….
How was Flynn a crook? Please explain with some bit of detail.
How was Manafort charged with wrong doing dating back to 2005? Any honest non-snarky answers appreciated. (In every other case I have heard of, financial crimes can only be charged within a 6 or 7 year time frame.)
95% of the time yes. In this case it is conceptually possible that Cohen intended the payment to influence the election but Trump did not. It still could literally be true that Trump directed him to make the payment but did not have the requisite intent. Notably, Cohen cannot testify directly as to what Trump’s intent was unless Trump told him “I want this to influence the election,” but he could testify to the circumstances and inferences can be made from that. Further, there might be some sort of legal presumption that something so close to the election was done to influence that election. I’m not saying that this is a good defense, just that it is theoretically possible.
The more interesting question to me is that Trump paid him back but Cohen plead guilty to excessive contributions anyway. Campaigns can owe people money and candidates can make unlimited contributions to their own campaign, so if Cohen was always going to be paid back then my understanding is the crime is not reporting the contribution rather than its size. This guilty plea only makes sense if Cohen made the payment to expecting to be paid back and Trump decided to pay him back later.
I think it is because campaign funds were used. Trump may be rich but he seems to have had a shortage of cash for this type of contingency.
The only real question at this point must be what effect, if any, will this have on the upcoming midterm elections?
Moderator Note:
Please don't poison the well.Cue the rationalizations!To say a billionaire had to use campaign money seems unlikely.
Cash is fungible.
If the original $130k came out of the campaign funds, anytime subsequent to the 130k payment Trump put at least $130k back into the campaign coffers he could simply say he was reimbursing the $130k he paid in hush money to the porn actress, thereby making the personal and not from the campaign funds.
@jamielockett, I respectfully but emphatically dissent from that part of your statement which relates to Lt. General Flynn, U.S. Army (Ret’d), who served my Nation, and yours, most honorably until he got cross-wise with the administration of the worst President in the history of this country (for telling the truth about some of its policies impacting National Security, about which it was his sworn duty to speak out about), was hounded by the gang of jackboots otherwise known as the Mueller A-Team, had to sell his family home in order to pay legal fees and was threatened with similar Gestapo like treatment of his son if he did not plead guilty, and whose guilty plea is under serious consideration by a Federal Judge who could tell you a thing or two about the “Leader” of the A-Team, Andrew Weissmann. I hold no brief for Manafort, except to note that his main crime was being involved in any way whatsoever with the President, hated with a white hot and visceral hatred by everyone connected with the “A-Team”, or Cohen. However, my sense of basic fairness requires me to note my strong objection to having this General of the United States Army lumped in with the likes of Manafort and Cohen.
Therefore, I respectfully dissent.
Sincerely, Jim
I don’t think he is any where near as rich as he says. Highly leveraged at the very least.
Didn’t Hillary’s emailgate indictment also hang on her intent or lack therof? Good times.
If I recall estimed lawyer Rudolf Guliani said Cohen was paid back by his retainer. My guess is that Trump tried to stiff him, and ended up never paying him back therby creating the illegal contribution. Is that possible? Because I know somehow this whole thing has to get even dirtier. This is Trump we are talking about.
Who wants to bet at his rally tonight he will say something deeply stupid and injurious to his defense. What happens with his Stormy NDA now?
Trump supporeters will call it Fake News, and say everybody does it anyway. Democrats will smell blood and say we need to take over Congress to investigate this further and expose the corruption and impeach Trump for violating the law. And most people will not vote.
$130k is still not much to the seriously wealthy, which while Trump is a serial BS’er about exactly how wealthy he is(about anything for that matter) , he is still seriously wealthy.
That has been his Modus Operandi. It would be a really stupid thing to do but it could explain Cohen taping Trump.
This $130k payment is worse than the $1.9M in campaign contributions the Obama ‘08 campaign somehow failed to report? For that they were fined $375,000 by the FEC.
It’s true. They were fined.
Surely you’re not saying that Trump compares favorably to the lamentable Obama because his violation is just so… teensy weensy in comparison?
Dinesh D’Souza was jailed for routine financial “fraud” as I recall.
Yes but did Obama instruct them to not report the money or did they fail to because they just weren’t good at accounting? You can fail to live up to the law, be guilty of it and pay a fine. If you set out to wilfully break the law, then lie about it to everyone I think it’s worse.
No. Trumps campaign should be fined and we can move on. Did someone on the Obama campaign admit their violations happened st the direction of the candidate?