Mueller Investigation: Trump Likely to Be Indicted, But Will He Be Impeached?

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.

I’m not blaming Trump for what he’s done to this point, given especially that he really doesn’t have a political party backing him.

But by now he must realize that the permanent government and the political parties have him boxed in. He is probably going down, one way or the other. He can do the most good for the future of the country, such as it is, by “burning the house down” and going all in on showing the people what this government really is and how it really operates.

It is mutually assured destruction, but that may be the only way to avoid a Marxist USA with the permanent government and political elite class untouchable for as long as we can see.

Trump is not going to survive, let alone thrive, with the wolves at his neck and no defense coming to help. He might as well let the nukes go downfield and hope in the aftermath that the people wake up to what their government is.

To expand...Trump tried to bring the party over the finish line in the midterms. If he had defied history and held the House, the party would become his party. As it is, with the loss, the party is still the old Republican Party...not Trump’s new party.

He made the play to take the party as his own - it didn’t work - the party is still not his party, he didn’t bring them the big, miracle victory that he needed in order to make them fall in line behind him.

Now he’s boxed in and vulnerable...and he still does not a political party behind him. Almost as many want him out as support him amongst the elected Republicans in D.C. And Romney is there to be his Judas.

He only has left the ability to go after the government with the power of his position and show their malfeasance and, frankly, treason. He needs the people to rise up against the government class once again. This is the only way to do it and he is sacrificing himself in the process.

But he’s doomed anyway, he took his shot (at making the party his) and came up short. He might as well do something for the people on his way down.

“You can’t indict a sitting president.”

I think that’s a legal gray area. President Impy would certainly fire any Federal prosecutor that tired to indict him, in fact President Impy wouldn’t have let it get this far, there would have been no investigation or special counsel, damn the consequences, would they have been worse than this?

Anyway, RE: Impeachment, if there are no prospect for removal why would any GOP Senator risk their future by voting against Trump? You think the 2 from NC would?

I presume for a trial that a majority would be enough to dictate procedure so 51 would be needed to move for an immediate acquittal without a dog and pony show.

This is one scenario, definitely.

But as we saw, politics is fickle. We STILL do not know what motivated House voters in 2018, and so far the junk I’ve seen doesn’t explain much. One analysis by Henry Olsen (relying way too heavily on AZ) said that the Ds deliberately stayed away from Trump. Well, if that’s true he still has a chance to make this “his” party.

Much will depend on whether the House goes for impeachment. If they do, then all eyes fall on the Senate and the sinister six, Minion, Burrito, Mel Tillis, MurCowSki, Collins, and Sasshole. I think these would be the six most likely NOT to vote for an immediate dismissal.

After them, you have Rubes, Ernst, Fischer, and possibly Portman or Kyl who “could” be moved if there was genuine proof of “high crimes.” I think this would ONLY include the FISA release to these six.

So you’d get a Clinton type acquittal.

Now, NO Republican will come close to beating Trump in the primaries, so then we’re back to, are you guys really gonna sit there for FOUR MORE YEARS and do nothing trying to wait him out? And risk a “yellow vest” revolution? I think it’s getting to that point.

The financial markets are riled. Much of that is lack of progress on real, genuine, consistent work out of Congress which shows up as instability.

First of all Hysterical Hannah I listen to Rush too and he did not say he thought Trump was going be impeached and removed from office. As he always does Rush speculates on what the left would like to do and how they might plot to go about it not that they will be successful. I very seriously doubt The Democrat House will move to impeach Trump and commit suicide but even if they do the Senate is not going to get 67 votes to remove their own party's president because he paid privately to shut up a porn actress. You need to move into the realm of reality. Read Craig the Sawman Sawyer's open letter to the left about what will happen if there is any attempt to remove Trump from office. That's the more likely scenario. So let me know when Mueller arrests Hillary and John Podesta. PS: Thanks for removing me from the list. I no longer have to receive your juvenile private messages that require a decoder ring to even figure out who or what you are talking about. it's like 8th grade all over again. 😅

What you and LS need to understand is that while the MSM is whipping you up into a fit of hysteria Trump just sent another 100 guys from the 305th to Gitmo to guard those 9 lonely prisoners still incarcerated there.

I’ll bet neither one of you paid attention as Lindsay Graham slow walked Brett Kavanagh through the definition of treason and the law of armed conflict during his confirmation hearing. Come January a more likely scenario than impeachment is the big pooper scooper is going to start rounding up traitors and sending them to Gitmo for military tribunals. Members of Congress are not immune from this. There are some Democrat Congressmen who will be thinking about a lot of things but impeachment ain’t gonna be one of them.

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