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.

The key to the whole thing that McCarthy ignored in his article is whether the two expenditures actually were campaign expenditures as defined by the statute. Most important, the statute and regulations exempt "personal expenditures" from reporting and generally define them as expenditures a candidate makes to cover non-campaign debts. Those debts definitely can include hush money payments to inconvenient former paramours or wannabe paramours. Indeed, if a campaign even makes such payments with the candidate's knowledge, that candidate can be prosecuted for making illegal personal expenditures from his campaign, as happened with the late Bill Scott, a former IL governor.

Thus, if PDJT had reported the two settlements as campaign expenditures, he'd have immediately admitted committing two felonies, for which he could be impeached, convicted, and prosecuted. By making those expenditures entirely from his personal funds he actually avoided committing campaign finance violations. IOW he is now being attacked for doing his best to comply with, and complying with, campaign finance law.

You can’t indict a sitting president. This has been established now, twice. They can call him an “unindicted co-conspirator,” or whatever, but all they can do is use this to try to impeach him.

The 40-seat advantage in the House means impeachment is likely. Had it just been 4-5 seats, pressure on some of the red-state Ds would be too powerful. But Botoxic will “release” enough of them to maintain the margin to impeach and still let them out of it.

So, the senate. I count about 39 pretty strong Trump votes. I count another 7 who are squishes, who could go either way. There are about 7 I think will vote for removal, including Minion, Burrito, Mel Tillis, MurCowSki, Tom Collins, and perhaps two others.

In other words, McConnell would likely have enough votes for an immediate “dismissal” on no grounds rather than a trial.

The election of Braun, Hawley, Scott, Blackburn, and Cramer are going to prove absolutely KEY to keeping Trump. Honestly, I don’t think Heller or McSally would help us. I would not be sure either would be a full Trump supporter. Rosendale would have and Renacci would have. But we should have more than enough.

NY Democrat Jerry Nadler's comments are noteworthy in part because he was on the Judiciary Committee that voted
to impeach Bill Clinton......at the time Nadler said that vote was tantamount to an attempted coup and a
gross abuse of the House's impeachment power.

NADLER'S INCIPIENT ALZHEIMERS?

freebeacon.com BY: Jack Heretik, August 26, 2018

NY Democrat Jerry Nadler was confronted about his comments–made during former President Bill Clinton's impeachment–saying a president can't commit obstruction of justice. NBC's MTP's Chuck Todd asked Nadler about his past comments, in which he was defending Clinton during the impeachment proceedings against him.".......back in 1999, during the debate about whether or not Bill Clinton obstructed justice, you said at the time you were not convinced that a president could obstruct justice," Todd said. "Do you feel that way, that it's not one of the quote ‘might not be impeachable,’ put it this way, that obstruction of justice might not be an impeachable offense?"

A DEMOCRAT-INDUCED MEMORY---- "Well, I don't remember saying that, but if I said it, I said it, but no, I don't agree with that today. A president, anybody can obstruct justice," Nadler said. "Obstruction of justice under certain circumstances might be an impeachable offense. Remember, there is a very big difference between a crime which may or may not be impeachable and an impeachable offense which doesn't have to be a crime."

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Nadler has been a member of Congress since 1992 and was part to the Clinton impeachment proceedings. In a 1998 floor speech, Nadler said Clinton perjuring himself was not an impeachable offense."Perjury is a serious crime and, if provable, should be prosecuted in a court of law. But it may or may not involve the president’s duties and performance in office. Perjury on a private matter, perjury regarding sex, is not a great and dangerous offense against the Nation. It is not an abuse of uniquely presidential power. It does not threaten our form of government. It is not an impeachable offense," Nalder said.

At the time Nadler said Clinton's perjury with regard to a private sexual affair did not threaten the Constitutional order; it is a crime but was not an impeachable offense. Perjury regarding an attempt by a president to subvert the Constitutional order, to aggrandize power probably, would be an impeachable offense."

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That was then:
Nadler defended Clinton "eloquently," arguing the lewinskied Clinton shouldn't be impeached for lying to conceal his affair with an intern.

This is now:
incoming chair Nadler is itching to impeach Trump using discredited witnesses like porn star Stormy Daniels and her sleaze lawyer Michael Avenatti.

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