Posted on 12/10/2018 9:05:26 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The 40-page sentencing memo filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York for former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen is the basis for an indictment against the president, according to Andrew McCarthy.
McCarthy believes the charges will be for violating campaign finance laws. It's alleged that Cohen and Trump paid off two women to hide their sexual liaisons with Trump during the 2016 campaign. The violation occurred when Cohen made the payments and cooked the books to hide them. That's fraud and Cohen will go to jail for it.
As McCarthy points out, the prosecutors have had Trump in their sights from the beginning:
But when Cohen pleaded guilty in August, prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of” the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.
Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all. Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud, involving millions of dollars.
Trump has denied he had sex with the women as well as denying any payoff. But why indict Trump when violations like this are usually handled administratively and rarely rise to the level of a crime?
Moreover, campaign finance infractions are often settled by payment of an administrative fine, not turned into felony prosecutions. To be sure, federal prosecutors in New York City have charged them as felonies before – most notably in 2014 against Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump later pardoned.
In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million – an amount that dwarfs the $280,000 in Cohen’s case – the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute. Instead, the matter was quietly disposed of by a $375,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission.
The sticking point is Cohen's efforts to conceal the payments from the FEC. The prosecutors will allege that Trump was involved in that process.
The sentencing memo for Cohen argues that the hush money payments were not merely unreported. It states that Cohen and the Trump organization – the president’s company – went to great lengths to conceal them by fraudulent bookkeeping.
Equally significantly, Cohen was not charged with merely making illegal donations. He was charged in the first campaign finance count with causing a company to make illegal donations.
That company was the National Enquirer, which bought Karen McDougal's story for $150,000 and then buried it at Cohen's request. There was apparently a promise to repay the company -- a promise that was never kept.
Throughout the memo is the suggestion that Trump knew what Cohen was doing and ordered him to do it. Cohen has already admitted lying to Congress so the question of his credibility in telling prosecutors that Trump was in on the payoff scheme remains open.
Trump is not without a defense in this case and it's no slam dunk. Plus, Justice Department guidance states that a sitting president cannot be indicted. There is much debate over that point -- a question that could be tied up in court for years.
So Democrats have to ask themselves if they should impeach Donald Trump for violations of the campaign finance laws.
More importantly, do campaign finance violations qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which is the constitutional standard for impeachment? It is hard to imagine an infraction that the Justice Department often elects not to prosecute is sufficiently egregious to rise to that level, but the debate on this point between partisans would be intense.
To kick Trump out of office, Democrats are going to have to find 13 Republican senators to convict the president in a Senate trial. Over a violation of campaign finance laws? Really?
That's why all this excitement and hysteria over the prosecution filing in the sentencing of Michael Cohen is partisans blowing smoke.
Clinton did get impeached over what he did, which was perjury and obstruction.
Trump will most likely not, unless the Dems see it as a political positive, rather than a destructive negative to their own party. The fact that Trump committed no crime is irrelevant to their decision.
Who is Kim Clement?
1. Mueller can't have it both ways. On the one hand he accuses Cohen of being a rabid liar( He is charging him with perjury). On the other hand, the same Mueller is now saying Cohen is the most truthful human on the planet when he says Trump ordered him to pay off The creepy porn skank.
2. It is perfectly legal for Trump (a married billionaire) to use his own money to payoff any woman he wants to prevent news of any such liaison from getting to his wife.
Here is Joe Digenova on this very matter:
Fast forward to the 3:30 mark.
https://youtu.be/oApdLI9soek
Even Rush is saying this.
Wow. Someone is clueless.
Ummm..no. You need a two thirds Senate majority to remove a president from office. The Democrats will have only 47 seats. They re going to need 20 Republicans to switch. And they won't have McCain, Flake or Corker. There is zero chance of removing Trump from office.
have you not been listening to Rush? Or me?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a crime. If SDNY calls it a crime, it is enough for the House to impeach.
Yes. Exactly what Rush is saying right now.
Please don’t keep trying to make “legal” sense of this.
SDNY will indict, says Andy McCarthy. Even if it’s an “unindicted co-conspirator,” it will be enough to trigger impeachment. That’s the goal, not an actual, “legal” crime.
I’m pretty sure if he declassifies he loses those 7 squishes in the Senate. Then you’re getting into pretty close removal territory.
In fact, I think many of the squishes like Burrito and Mel Tillis, let alone new squishes like Minion, WANT him to declassify so they can use it as a wedge to pry away some of Trump’s more “solid” supporters like Barasso, Ernst, Cochran.
For the left/RINOs it’s all about creating enough cover that the squishes can feel secure in removing Trump.
Robert Mueller is an incompetent, arrogant, deep state hack. If you’ve never seen him testify to Congress, here is 10 minutes with former Congressman Chavetz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFNO8tSEgTM
When did Trump have time for Sex ?
https://www.quodverum.com/2018/12/337/trump-s-master-spooks.html
Great read for the gutless whiners and the wusses who are weak in the knees. Not one of the whiners would last an hour in Trump’s shoes. We should all get down on our knees and thank God for the election of Donald J. Trump. And, yes, thank God we had men with gonads at Normandy and elsewhere throughout our history unlike those wringing their hands over the latest attempt of the Deep State to destroy our President, steal our freedom, and destroy our nation.
There is absolutely nothing Donald Trump did that will ever shake my resolve to support him and his patriotism. I have absolute faith in his love for our country; his love for our military and law enforcement; and his love of our Constitution.
Could he be impeached? Yes. Could he be removed from office? No.
I guess I’m living in a dream world where our DOJ attorneys and our lawmakers abide by the law and apply justice equally. Not change or reinterpret laws for certain people.
That concept went the way of the DODO Bird. The purpose of the law now is to keep the serfs in line and punish those who tick off the Elite.
Yes. Exactly what Rush is saying right now.
............
Yep, he literally just said it...so to make me feel better, I’m playing Vince Guaraldi, Charlie Brown music...here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvI_FNrczzQ&list=PLEpZan9S2GOFesp-gJqsdD80a7zoaflHa&index=5
The globalists have declared war against America. They have fired their opening salvo. All I can say that it is our turn now and it won’t be fun for them. Their worst nightmare is about to unfold.
I agree. And if he used Campaign Funds to do so, then I’m guessing that’s a crime. And if Cohen used the funds to do so and Trump just reimbursed Cohen, then that seems murkier to me.
Either way, I don’t see this being an impeachable offense and even if it were - I don’t see Trump being convicted by the Senate.
The other thing is this - and it’s only my “sense” - people are already tiring of this thing dragging out. With the holidays coming, it will go well into the beginning of next year. Tons of money has been spent. Will voters be sick of this when the time comes for Dems to decide whether or not to impeach? I think they will be if they aren’t already.
I think pushing this to impeachment is the wrong move for house Dems and what’s more, I think they know it. So they’re hoping for the moon here. The ULTIMATE smoking gone. And when they don’t get it, they’ll drop it or formally reprimand/censure or something. And we’ll have spent 10s of millions of dollars for nothing.
There’s no Russian collusion. No evidence that even a single vote was changed. Trump didn’t need to cheat to beat Hillary. She was universally hated.
So we’ll have spent 10s of millions to find out that a married man who wanted to be President paid a whore to stay quiet about banging her.
News at 11? I don’t think so....
If he only plays defense he is crushed in 2020, if he survives 2019. He becomes a punching bag even more feeble than George W. Bush was at the end. Impeachment will not make him heroic, like it did for Clinton, he doesn’t have the media, he doesn’t have the culture behind him, he doesn’t even have his own party with him. He is crushed if he plays only defense.
He needs to burn the house down, or all of us are going to live under Marxism for the rest of our lives.
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