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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
In the third week of June 1973, White House Counsel John Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee, that he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Richard Nixon. Today, Trump’s Attorney Michael Cohen stated that he had acted in coordination and with and at the direction of Trump.
It took another year for the taping system to be discovered, for the Saturday Night Massacre, for a trip over a couple of months to the Supreme Court to be completed, for the House Judiciary Committee to vote to impeach on three of five proposed Articles of Impeachment, where a third to 40% of the 17 Republican Committee Members voted for two of the Articles, for the tapes to be revealed, and for Barry Goldwater and the House and Senate Minority Leaders to visit Nixon, who thereafter resigned 44 years ago this month.
Also, Nixon’s Campaign Manager, former Attorney General John Mitchell, was convicted by a federal jury. Trump’s Campaign Manager Paul Manafort was just convicted by a federal jury.
This is not the Beginning of the End, but this is the End of the Beginning.
Six years and three months after Nixon resigned, the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century was elected.
Who is the Republican Governor who will stride into the Presidency in 2020 or 2024?
What republican will be left when basically 80% of the party walks away from your putin backed neo-fascist coup? You have to convince voters that your neofascist coup is totally the right thing to do and totally not a trumped up pile of nonsense strung together in some kind of absurd dadaist poem.
You have to convince the 80-90% of republicans that wildly approve of his work, that this isn’t bullcrap or the criminalization of politics. Because honestly the only people beating this drum are the people that would be beating this drum if trump cured cancer, so their opinions do not technically qualify as information.
So far Trump hasn’t done anything worse than Bill Clinton.
You can’t have a system where Republicans are always guilty while Democrats are often never charged for similar crimes.
Reagan benefitted by being in California, governing a big state, and being far away from the mess in Washington.
Where Trump has succeeded, he was following conservative principles concerning judges, taxes and regulations.
Where Trump is failing, with trade and what appears to be kompromat, he is acting well outside conservative principles.
Clinton was impeached for perjury. (It is revealing listening to Lindsey Graham speaking as on earth of the House Impeachment Managers.) Clinton lost his law license. Clinton paid lots of money to Paula Jones.
But Clinton didn’t try to throw an election with the help of a hostile foreign power. If he had, I would guess that he might have been convicted and removed from office.
Cohen arranging an NDA with a porn actress, while certainly sleazy and embarrassing, is entirely legal.
Any competent attorney would know that, but non-lawyers are excused for not understanding the law.
The Feds (ie: with Mueller lurking somewhere in the background ) getting Cohen to plead to the campaign finance violation of taking direction from Trump to “influence the election” by paying the porn actress hush money, is a plea deal scam to get Cohen a lighter sentence and to ostensibly fake the stupid into believing contracting into an NDA is actually a Federal crime/campaign law violation.
Throwing in the term “conspiring to influence the election” touch is an absolutely delightful way to try to work in the original Special Counsel mandate without the preceding words The Russians . Those Federal Prosecutors are sure a bunch of wascally of wabbits.
Trump barely won.
Bush lost several points nationally when his old DUI was revealed just before the 2000 election.
Are you suggesting that Trump would have won if Cohen had not secured the Non-Disclosure Agreements in the last couple of weeks before the election and either the porn star or the Playboy Playmate stories came out?
You mean like Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Obama’s political appointees in DOJ and the IC?
It’s the money, shell corporations and reimbursement that make it a crime. If Trump has simply paid the woman out of his own pocket it wouldn’t be. Instead they set up an elaborate mechanism by which Cohen paid the money and was then repaid by the campaign. Other expenses related to the campaign were folded into the repayments. It was clearly a campaign expenditure. An illegal one.
Now I don’t think this was a case of Trump seeking to break the law on purpose (although ignorance is no defense) but rather a case of the President and his attorney having an established system for paying off the presidents concubines that became illegal once a campaign for president was launched.
In short: the President needed a better lawyer. One that actually knew the rules.
This won’t lead to impeachment. It’s clear that the Republicans and their base have put all their eggs in the Trump basket. There’s no political will to impeach Trump over a technical violation of the law. Fine the campaign and be done with it.
Trump should stand up and say: “Okay, we made a mistake. This is pretty common for federal campaigns, I mean the law is ridiculous, ridiculous. President Obama and Crooked Hillary also had minor violations like this. They paid a fine and that was it.” Whips our checkbook “So? Where do I send the check? Let’s get on with making America Great Again!”
Not a crime to contract an into an NDA.
Was Trump personally aware of the payment structure, and could the payment structure have been subsequently remedied to reimburse the campaign and thus make the payment personal … of course.
If memory serves, Mark Twain reportedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
The correlation between Nixon, Clinton and Trump is not on all fours, but it is remarkable with all of the commonalities.
John Hinderaker gets it right.
This strikes me as reasonable.
Yes the corruption of the Obama FBI/DOJ/Intel community in their efforts to exonerate HRC and screw Trump to the wall with a phony Russia collusion narrative is Nixonian indeed.
One wonders what the purpose of this post is supposed to be. Perhaps it would be more apparent if it wasn’t so oblique.
Thanks for the history lesson. If only it had something to do with the O/P.
It’s all part of Trump colluding with the Russians to influence the 2016 Presidential election don’t you get it?
A short list would help.
Perhaps!
It’s a fallacy to extrapolate in a straight line.
There may not have been the political will to impeach Trump as of yesterday morning. Things may be different on the morning of November 7.
How much longer can people keep using the phrase “phony Russia collusion narrative” honestly?
The campaign manager, Trump’s son-in-law, and Trump’s son met in Trump Tower, with what they believed to be an agent of the Russian government to get dirt on Clinton. And they’ve since lied about it repeatedly.
That’s not Obama’s fault. That’s not the Intel community’s fault. That’s not Clinton’s fault. That’s not The Deep State’s fault. That’s not the media’s fault.
I’d like to see some more reporting about these so-called congressional “hush money” funds, which supposedly use taxpayer dollars to settle sexual harassment accusations against members. I’ve head these settlements involve NDAs. I wonder if they’re considered campaign contributions. Perhaps they should be. It’s late summer, but what a bumper crop of hypocrites could be harvested this fall!
Honestly? A lot longer. Like, forever. It’s called opposition research and a “nothing burger” when Democrats do it.
Hilary Clinton’s Ukraine connection a question worth exploring
Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire
The timing of the Manafort conviction and Cohen plea deal before the Bruce Ohr hearings next week seems to me to be significant.
Doesn’t matter. That would make it a loan and also illegal.
We have to find out when the Deep Stste manages to plant Don Jr into the Trump organization. The Deep State plays the long game.
Is there any earlier or later date that you could name where someone couldn’t point to the timing and say “It seems to be significant”?
You’re right, of course.
I mean, everybody just glossed over when Chelsea Clinton and Robby Mook met with that Russian lawyer on the promise of getting dirt from the Russian government about Trump.
Oh, right. That never happened.
Funny how the people rationalizing it for Trump would be the ones [defecating] bricks in it had though.
Not if this is all there is. As Jamie said, he pays the fine and goes about his business.