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.
Did he prophecy that it would be tried?
Thank you for your insights.
If it goes to the Senate after impeachment by the House, does Trump get “discovery” of what the other side has?
If he were to somehow get indicted and go to trial, I believe he gets discovery of what the other side has.
In either case, what’s discovered might be interesting.
It’s the Clinton impeachment payback. Of course Pelosi and crew will Impeach him. They cant resist, regardless of the grounds. But the Senate will not convict. Just like for the Bent One.
Not a sex scandal. There is nothing “scandalous” about some private real estate developer cheating on his wife. Nor is there anything scandalous about a billionaire paying women not to talk, after having consensual sexual relationships that the billionaire would rather keep secret.
That’s pretty thin gruel.
That sounds like a president on defense, being hammered from every direction...even his own nominal party.
If Trump stays on defense, he’s finished in 2020, even if the propaganda machine and Republican divisions don’t convict him in the Senate.
He needs to “burn the house down” if this is how it is going to go...declassify everything, declassify and publicize Congress’ sex payout fund, take it all down. Otherwise we go quietly into Marxism, in 2020 if not 2019.
a president cannot be indicted.
a president can be impeached, but the D’s would make themselves the LAUGHING STOCK of the world if they try to impeach PDJT now without any evidence
As a practical matter, indicting a president is impractical without bulletproof evidence of a heinous crime. That being said, should a rouge prosecutor file charges, and the lawyer be fired for doing so, you can bet impeachment would go forward for “obstruction of justice.”
I would not trust the Senate. It is infested with President Trump hating rats [Republicans, not Democrats] such Rubio, etal.
They will try, for sure.
They are trying to tank Trump’s numbers even by Christmas, by tanking the market...
There are so many evil people in this country, it makes me sick.
All to protect their moats around their castles. “Let them eat cake!”
The only battles I look forward to are the ones with the odds in my favor. The rest, such as this battle with two ways to lose and only one way to win, I try to avoid or reposition.
Of course, the upcoming battle is unavoidable, we have to play with the cards dealt, and we are unaware of all of the assets available to Trump in order to better prepare the battlefield.
If the Socialist Dems can oust Trump they will be, in the eyes of many of our younger voters, the coolest dudes in town - at least for a few more election cycles. That may be enough to take us beyond the tipping point into a more challenging and certainly bloody reality.
Haven’t you been paying attention? He’ll be impeached even if not indicted. The entire script has been written.
Wait. Back in the 90s didn’t the Democrats and their media allies tell us that lying about sex was not an impeachable offense ?
Mueller needs to have his own special cell at GITMO.
20. They need 67 votes and they have 47.
Thank you. But I just don’t see how paying off women is a crime or a FEC violation. Wealthy people in high positions pay “shut up” money all the time, just to avoid the controversy.
What about John Edwards?
Clement was a false prophet, Mark Taylor is a false prophet, Pat Robertson was a false prophet; indeed almost every person, if not every single person, in the “Christian” entertainment industry is a false prophet. The standard for God’s prophets is 100% accuracy. If any of these people are wrong in the slightest detail, then they are not God’s prophets. So beware of these people, they are liars.
It’s more crap to drag it out for 2 more years
You are insane. Nobody is going to impeach Trump and the Senate is not going to remove him. Pelosi and Schumer are smarter than they look. Even if they were stupid enough to push for impeachment the GOP Senate is not going to remove a Republican president. It would set off either CW11 or a military takeover and martial law.
This BS is about as credible as your never ending drivel that Mueller was really working with Trump to go after Hillary and the Podestas. Nobody in their right mind ever believed that. Well except you.
More likely than any of your hairbrained scenarios we will see two years of gridlock between the House and Senate.
I wish we had a president without Trump's baggage. But we don't. So: paying hush money is not a crime. And it is not a campaign contribution. There would be a campaign finance violation had Trump used campaign funds to pay for a personal expense, but he didn't.
Democrats rationalize pursuing the sex issue on the basis of Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski. They forget that Ken Starr and the Republicans didn't instigate the Lewinski case. She surfaced as a pattern and practice witness in the Paula Jones lawsuit, which the GOP had nothing to do with. The matter was flipped to Ken Starr as just one more of the myriad Clinton scandals that he was already handling. It became important because of the witness tampering, subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice issues involving the same team of fixers that kept resurfacing in multiple Clinton cases. The fact that Linda Tripp had tape recordings offered the opportunity to finally crack the criminal conspiracy.
Be that as it may, open ended investigations of sexual misconduct is now being routinized. Unless every 2020 Democrat presidential prospect has led a 100 percent sexually chaste life, one would think that the dems might want to exercise some caution. They will reap what they sow. They are of course counting on the media to ignore Democratic dalliances, but that's probably whistling past the graveyard.
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