Donald Trump’s Legal Problems Are Far From Over!

Esquire

Donald Trump’s Legal Problems Are Far From Over. Just Look at What’s Happening in New York.

The enormous volume of coverage and commentary regarding Mueller’s failure to “establish” criminal collusion has obscured Donald Trump’s legal troubles in New York.

By Ryan Lizza      April 2, 2019

President Trump holds a law enforcement roundtable on sanctuary cities at the White HouseGETTY IMAGES

While there are still a lot of questions about what’s actually in the Mueller Report, the legal danger for Donald Trump from the Special Counsel in D.C. has largely passed. The focus now is about to move to New York, and the legal danger for Trump in his hometown. And at the heart of Trump’s exposure is a man whose name has recently been sidelined: his former attorney, Michael Cohen.

In D.C., Special Counsel Robert Mueller looked at what was both the most serious accusation against Trump and also the one that was the least likely to be proven: that Trump affirmatively and criminally conspired with Russians in their twin plots to hack and distribute Democratic emails and spread disinformation through social media.

Special Counsel Mueller's Trump-Russia Probe Report Reviewed By Attorney General William Barr
Robert Mueller not heaving a visible sigh of relief two weeks ago after delivering his eponymous report to Attorney General William Barr. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

 

It was not exactly preposterous that Trump, rather than simply being the primary beneficiary of this foreign interference plot, took some step that crossed the line into a criminal conspiracy. After all, he publicly cheered the hacking and dumping efforts—even after it was known that they were being conducted by a hostile government. As president, he spent months denying that the Russian government was behind the disinformation campaign, despite irrefutable evidence from his own intelligence advisers. He repeatedly attacked and discredited anyone investigating the Russian plot. He worked to tilt policy in a curiously pro-Russia direction (at least when he wasn’t overruled by Congress or his advisers). His topmost campaign and personal advisers—Flynn, Manafort, Stone, Cohen—lied to prosecutors or congressional investigators.

But even though Trump acted like a person with something to hide, it was always unlikely that he was stupid enough—or, somewhat conversely, even had the ability—to have engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the enemy. If you’re reaping the rewards of someone else’s criminal conduct, what’s the point of joining the conspiracy yourself?

The enormous volume of coverage and commentary regarding Mueller’s failure to “establish” criminal collusion—and the predictable response from Trump and his defenders that that single conclusion, at least as filtered through the attorney general, means that Trump is in the clear here, there, and everywhere—has obscured his legal troubles in New York.

Did Trump break the law when he dangled pardons for Cohen, an issue a source says is being looked at by SDNY?

New York doesn’t just mean the Southern District of New York, the federal prosecutorial outpost in Manhattan. The state’s Attorney General and its Department of Taxation and Finance also have active investigations of Trump entities. Across the East River, in Brooklyn, the Eastern District of New York is reportedly looking at Trump’s inaugural committee. But Trump may have the most to fear from SDNY.

And if you want to understand the potential danger to Trump from SDNY, it’s worth re-visiting the case of Michael Cohen.

Cohen, who is scheduled to start a three-year jail sentence in May, shows what can happen when a prosecutor aims all of his enormous legal powers on a single target. It is not true, though it is often alleged by Trump supporters, that the Mueller investigation began with the Steele Dossier. (The FBI opened its inquiry in the summer of 2016 after an Australian diplomat reported that a Trump aide may have had a heads up about the email hacking plot.) But in Cohen’s case the dossier is probably what triggered the FBI’s aggressive investigation of his life.

Former Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Enters Plea Deal Over Tax And Bank Fraud And Campaign Finance Violations
Michael Cohen, former Trump fixer, leaving Federal Court in New York last August after pleading guilty to bank fraud, tax fraud, and campaign finance violations. Yana Paskova/Getty Images

 

The document included a murky claim that Cohen had met some Russian agents in Prague, and, according to someone close to Cohen, he believes that it was that allegation that caused Mueller to target Cohen in July 2017, just weeks after Mueller was appointed special counsel.

The 900 pages of search warrants and other documents that were recently released in the Cohen case lay bare how much of someone’s life a prosecutor can expose when on a focused hunt for a crime. Starting in 2017, prosecutors were in Cohen’s phone and email. They accessed his location data. They grabbed his banking records. And the following April three dozen agents raided his home, law office, hotel, and safety deposit box, seizing millions of pages documents. (Though the only thing they took from the safety deposit box, which was primarily used to store his wife’s jewelry, was a T.D. Bank passbook from his son’s bar mitzvah.)

When New York prosecutors, who received the case from Mueller, finished with Cohen very little of what he plead guilty to related to Russia. There was no mention that he was ever in Prague meeting with Russian handlers in his plea agreement. Instead, he was charged with:

• hiding income from the IRS;

• lying to a bank to secure a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC)

• violating campaign finance laws by paying Stormy Daniels the $130,000 she demanded to keep her from disclosing her relationship with Trump during the election;

• and, in the one Russia-related charge, lying to Congress about the timing of when Trump ended his pursuit of a deal to build a tower in Moscow.

Proving collusion with Russia is difficult. Proving bank fraud is easy. Cohen had plenty of equity in his home to justify the HELOC, but he failed to disclose some large liabilities on the loan application. Bank fraud. (Cohen did not need the HELOC to pay Daniels, as is often reported. He had several million dollars in his bank account. But he knew he couldn’t easily explain to his wife why he was paying six figures to a porn star so he had to find an alternative stream of money.)

Trump's Personal Lawyer Michael Cohen Appears For Court Hearing Related To FBI Raid On His Hotel Room And Office
Stormy Daniels, alleged Trump paramour and recipient of the $130,000 in “hush money” that has gotten Michael Cohen—and possibly Trump—into hot water. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

 

Cohen did not set up some elaborate tax cheating scheme with offshore accounts and phony records—he was no Paul Manafort—but he did fail to pay more than a million dollars in taxes over five years. As soon as he knew he was busted he sent a check to the government. Too late. Similar cases are often settled with the IRS through a civil process where fines are the norm, but SDNY made it a criminal case. The campaign finance violation has been attacked by some conservative critics as a stretch because Trump would arguably have paid Stormy even if he wasn’t running for president, and because a similar case against John Edwards resulted in a hung jury and the government declined to re-prosecute it. But Cohen felt he had no choice but to plead guilty, fearing he might otherwise face even more dire charges against him as well as his wife, who was involved with his businesses.

SDNY prosecutors treated Cohen like a hardened criminal and they made it clear they wanted his superiors at the Trump Organization and other institutions put on notice. In a sentencing memo, the prosecutors argued in favor of “a significant sentence of imprisonment” on the tax and bank charges in order to “deter tax evasion and other financial crimes by sending the important message that even powerful individuals cannot cheat on their taxes and lie to financial institutions with impunity.”

The prosecutors were even more outraged by the campaign finance plot:

“First, Cohen’s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for President of the United States struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency…. Effective deterrence of such offenses requires incarceratory sentences that signal to other individuals who may contemplate conduct similar to Cohen’s that violations of campaign finance laws will not be tolerated. Particularly in light of the public interest in this case, the Court’s sentence may indeed have a cognizable impact on that problem by deterring future candidates, and their ‘fixers,’ all of whom are sure to be aware of the Court’s sentence here, from violating campaign finance laws.”

The SDNY has shown it does not mess around—and members of Trump’s family are not sitting presidents.

The problem for Donald Trump in all this? He directed Cohen to make the payments and signed checks to Cohen to cover the payments while he was president. Another of the checks reimbursing Cohen was signed by Donald Trump Jr. Forget about whether you agree that this is a strong case or not, but simply based on the way that they treated Cohen, how can the prosecutors here send Cohen to jail, condemn his behavior as an attack on the flag and apple pie, and simply walk away from holding his co-conspirators accountable?

And that’s just the campaign finance case, where we know most of the facts and actions taken by the president and his son. Now imagine if prosecutors are digging into Trump’s finances and companies the same way they dug into Cohen’s. Cohen has already given them a roadmap to potential charges against his former boss. In his public and private testimony before Congressional committees, Cohen alleged a long list of behavior by Trump and his companies that are the sorts of things that might sound minor, and which have received surprisingly little coverage while everyone has been focused on collusion, but in an aggressive prosecutor’s hands could amount to felonies.

Cohen was dismissive of the idea that Trump colluded with the Russians, but he painted the president as a liar and a con man and told a series of incriminating stories. Did Trump falsify his financial statements in trying to obtain a loan with Deutsche Bank when he tried to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014? Did he lie to any other financial institutions by inflating his net worth? Did he submit a false insurance claim? Did any members of a joint defense agreement, which included Ivanka Trump and previously included Cohen, suborn perjury? Did Trump break the law when he dangled pardons for Cohen after the April raid on Cohen’s home and offices, an issue that a source with knowledge says is being looked at by SDNY?

Justice Department Holds Briefing On Arrest Of A Suspect In Mail Bombing Case

Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney running SDNY, is considered to be temperamentally conservative. But his team has put the Trump Organization on warning by treating Cohen like a hardened criminal. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

The point here is not that Trump is a criminal or to engage in anti-Trump fantasies about the president being taken away in handcuffs. It is simply to point out that the real danger for Trump—and his closest family members—is from zealous prosecutors in New York who have already shown in the Cohen case that it is rather easy to find criminality, especially around taxes and banking, when the target is, to put it mildly, less than scrupulous with his books. SDNY is still bound by the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president, and Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney running SDNY, is considered to be temperamentally conservative. But his team has shown they do not mess around—and members of Trump’s family who have also served in the Trump Organization are not sitting presidents.

While some people, and surely Cohen himself, might look at the Cohen case and think that three years in prison is too long for the underlying crimes, the prosecutors looked at Cohen’s behavior and saw something larger. “Taken alone, these are each serious crimes worthy of meaningful punishment,” the prosecutors wrote. “Taken together, these offenses reveal a man who knowingly sought to undermine core institutions of our democracy.” It is difficult to read that and not conclude that there is real danger for Trump in New York.

Everything You Need to Know About the New Economy

Robert Reich
Everything You Need to Know About the New Economy
April 1, 2019
The biggest economic story of our time isn’t about supply and demand. It’s about institutions and power. Our latest video has everything you need to know about the new economy.

Everything You Need to Know About the New Economy

The biggest economic story of our time isn't about supply and demand. It's about institutions and power. Our latest video has everything you need to know about the new economy.

Posted by Robert Reich on Monday, April 1, 2019

The President Is Now Making 22 False Claims a Day

Esquire

The President Is Now Making 22 False Claims a Day. Media Coverage Has Got to Reflect That.

When will the press fully accept that Donald Trump and his allies are not acting in good faith?

By Jack Holmes           April 1, 2019

Donald Trump Holds MAGA Rally In Grand Rapids, MichiganSCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

It is fitting we mark April Fools’ Day, a day on which people say something is true but it’s not actually true and that constitutes comedy, with an update on the president’s propensity for saying things that are not true. The only thing more flabbergasting than the sheer volume of false claims made by Donald Trump, American president, is the inability of some in The Liberal Media to take that extensive record into account when covering the world’s most powerful man. There is no reason to believe the president, or anyone who works for him, when they say something. This is nothing to celebrate—it’s bad for the country and bad for the world. But it’s a fact.

In case you were holding out hope that the president’s word was still worth a damn, you might consider the findings from the Washington Post this fine Monday. They’ve been tracking the false claims this president made from day one of his presidency, and in short, he’s been continually upping the stakes. It took Trump 601 days to reach 5,000 false claims in public—a prodigious rate. In 2018, he was throwing out 15 a day. But over the last 200 days in particular, he’s outdone himself.

Now, on his 801st day, the count stands at 9,451, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement the president utters. That’s a pace of 22 fishy claims a day over the past 200 days, a steep climb from the average of nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in Trump’s first year in office.

Dave Chappelle has the lowdown here. Trump marked the occasion by lying about the Census, suggesting it’s “meaningless” without a citizenship question, which it has not had for nearly 70 years. He also described asylum—the principle under international law that people fleeing violence and persecution can seek refuge in another country—as a “loophole.”

President Trump Returns To The White House After Weekend in Mar a Lago

Trump and first lady Melania Trump walk off Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on March 31, 2019. TASOS KATOPODIS/Getty Images

But the real weapons of mass deception will be deployed as part of Trump’s resuscitated push to repeal Obamacare. You may recall Republicans tried this when they essentially controlled every branch of government in 2017, only to fail spectacularly. But Trump’s Justice Department opted last week gave up fighting a lawsuit lodged by various Republican secretaries of state, raising the possibility the law could be struck down by the kind of unelected judges about which Republicans occasionally used to complain. This raises the specter that the Trump administration—and the Republican Party more generally—will be complicit in throwing millions of Americans off their healthcare coverage heading into a presidential election year.

As the Post report on Trump’s truthiness illustrated, this will occasion a festival of deception from this president, like the dross he trotted out at his Totally Normal Rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the end of last week.

Remember this because it’s very important, and I’m speaking now for the Republican Party: We will always protect patients with preexisting conditions, always.

This goes well with Trump’s batty claim last week that “the Republican Party will become the Party of Healthcare!”

President Trump meets with Republican Senators on Capitol Hill

Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell walk in the Capitol. Pool/Getty Images

The various abominable healthcare “reform” bills Republicans cooked up in 2017 culminated with the Graham-Cassidy version, which offered states the chance to apply for “waivers” that granted them exemption from Obamacare’s “essential benefits” mandate. That guaranteed insurers had to cover 10 core services, like emergency room visits or prescription drugs or maternity care, but the Republican plan—which they tried to force through the Senate before it could be fully assessed by the Congressional Budget Office—could have waived these for insurance companies in states that applied.

Considering how many red states refused free money from the federal government to expand Medicaid (the Graham-Cassidy bill also rolled back that expansion), it’s safe to say many states would have sought waivers, which could have, according to Politico, jeopardized protections for “pre-existing conditions and undermine[d] prohibitions on annual and lifetime limits for insurance coverage.” As a fun little thing, Trump has tapped Bill Cassidy—the Cassidy in Graham-Cassidy—to develop the new Party of Healthcare’s plan. He’s joined by Rick Scott, who’s got his own stellar record on the issue.

You can safely assume that what you are hearing is a crock of shit, because the president says 22 false things per day in public now. Again, this makes it all the more gobsmacking that when Trump’s hand-picked attorney general wrote a summary of Robert Mueller’s report, members of The Liberal Media treated it as God’s own gospel. William Barr wrote a 19 page memo attacking the Mueller probe before he got the job, and now he’s saying his first letter was never meant to be a comprehensive summary of the Mueller Report’s findings. Yet The Barr Letter wasn’t just taken at face value—it was repeatedly referred to as The Mueller Report itself in press coverage.

Folks: It’s been years now. Lucy is not actually presenting the football for you to kick it.

Public skeptical of the president who cried exoneration

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog

Public skeptical of the president who cried exoneration

By Steve Benen             April 1, 2019

Image: US-POLITCS-FBI-MULLER
Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI)Director Robert Mueller testifies during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Commerce, Justice, Science,…    Brendan Smialowski

 

Most have probably heard the story of the boy who cried wolf. The moral of the story applies nicely to the president who cried exoneration.

Donald Trump has spent the last several months lying about being exonerated in the Russia scandal. It happened, by my count, at least six times in response to separate and unrelated developments, each of which did not absolve the president, his bogus claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

With this in mind, it felt familiar last week when Trump said Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in a report the president has neither seen nor read, had “totally” exonerated him, specifically on the question of obstruction of justice, despite Mueller writing that his report “does not exonerate” the president. The Associated Press explained this morning, “President Donald Trump is taking his interpretation of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation well beyond the facts.”

Why lie, repeatedly, about being absolved? It’s likely that Trump hoped to deceive the public so that he could try to reap some political and electoral rewards. The trouble is, the president who cried exoneration a few too many times clearly has a credibility problem.

Even as the White House claims vindication from the summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings in the Russia probe, the American public does not see a clear verdict about whether President Donald Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing.

According to a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing, based on what they have heard about Mueller’s findings, while 40 percent say they do not believe he has been cleared.

Similarly, the latest Washington Post poll asked respondents, “Mueller’s report states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him’ of obstructing justice. Trump said the report was a ‘complete exoneration.’ Who do you believe more – Trump or Mueller?”

Only 32% sided with the president.

There’s also the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, released late last week, which pointed in the same direction: “Almost six in 10 (56 percent) said that questions still exist, with just 36 percent saying Trump is clear of any wrongdoing.”

It’s possible more Americans would see this story the way the White House has told them to if the president were more trustworthy. It’s also possible the American mainstream is resisting the rush to judgment and wants to see the Mueller report before drawing conclusions about its contents.

Whatever the cause, if Trump assumed the public would accept his spin at face value, he’s probably disappointed that more people expect to see some proof before embracing White House talking points.

White House makes a health care promise it can’t keep

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show – The MaddowBlog

White House makes a health care promise it can’t keep

By Steve Benen             April 1, 2019

A doctor measures the blood pressure of a patient. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty)
A doctor measures the blood pressure of a patient. Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty

 

In the debate over health care policy, Donald Trump and his team have already left a long trail of broken promises, but the White House nevertheless continues to make commitments it will never be able to keep.

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that if the Trump administration succeeds in striking down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act in court, he can guarantee every person who has health coverage because of the Obama-era health law will not lose their coverage.

On “This Week,” ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Mulvaney whether he could provide such a guarantee for the millions of people who enrolled through HealthCare.gov, including those with pre-existing conditions and the people under the age of 26 enrolled under their parents’ plans.

“Yes and here’s why,” Mulvaney said Sunday. “Let’s talk about pre-existing conditions, because it gets a lot of the attention and rightly so. Every single plan that this White House has ever put forward since Donald Trump was elected, covered pre-existing conditions.”

The list of problems with this isn’t short. If the president’s scheme succeeds and the courts tear down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, millions of families will lose their coverage. It’s an unambiguous fact. To hear the acting White House chief of staff tell it, none of those people should worry, however, because those Americans would maintain coverage in a post-ACA landscape.

No one should take this seriously – because there is no Plan B. Mulvaney boasted, for example, “Every single plan that this White House has ever put forward since Donald Trump was elected, covered pre-existing conditions.” That might be reassuring if (a) the White House had ever put forward a health care plan of its own; and (b) the White House hadn’t endorsed a variety of proposals from congressional Republicans that would’ve gutted protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.

But stepping to look at all of this in the larger context, the root of the problem remains unchanged: GOP policymakers have spent a decade trying to craft an alternative to “Obamacare,” and they’ve failed repeatedly.

Trump and his Republican brethren seem to think this time will be different. They’re wrong – and it’s important to understand why.

On the surface, GOP officials are offering familiar rhetoric, repeated periodically since 2009, that the party’s blueprint is well on its way and will be available sometime soon. “There is a plan,” Kellyanne Conway told Fox News yesterday, adding that the Republican blueprint is “manifold.”

Reality, however, keeps getting in the way. As the Washington Post reported over the weekend, not only do Republicans not have a plan, “there are no plans to make such a plan.”

What about the Senate working group the president pointed to the other day? It now appears the group may not actually exist. Capitol Hill is looking to the White House to lead, the White House is looking to Capitol Hill to lead, and the result is a comedy of errors.

Stepping back, however, there’s a larger point that’s often overlooked. It’s easy to ridicule Republicans over their broken promises, bogus boasts, and imaginary plans, but the fact remains that there is no compelling GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act because it’s an unobtainable goal.

Bloomberg News had a good report last week that noted in passing, “The problem for GOP lawmakers is the paucity of free-market policy ideas for health care that are politically popular.”

It’s an important detail. For 10 years, Republicans have tried to come up with a health care plan – which voters would actually like – that would bring coverage to millions and protect Americans with pre-existing conditions, without extensive regulation of private insurers, spending a lot of money, raising taxes, or increasing the deficit.

They’ve failed, not simply as a matter of governance, but also as a matter of logic. GOP officials are effectively trying to create a square circle. It can’t be done. It won’t be done.

Republicans are constrained in ways Democrats are not. When Dems began work on the Affordable Care Act, they set out to solve a problem. When GOP policymakers tried to address the same challenge, they set out to solve a problem in an ideologically satisfying way that honored conservative principles about taxes, regulation, and the size of government.

Those self-imposed limits necessarily made their task impossible. After a decade of Republican effort, nothing has happened because nothing can happen.

If GOP officials were sincere about coming up with a model that might meet muster, it would look an awful lot like the Affordable Care Act – which, despite a decade of hysteria, is already the centrist model based entirely on bipartisan principles.

Postscript: There are some reports this morning that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)) is in “preliminary discussions” about coming up with an ACA replacement plan for his party. Since Romney helped create the first-ever statewide coverage plan, that might seem like a sensible strategy.

The trouble, however, is that Romney’s model served as the basis for “Obamacare,” which Republicans have convinced themselves is unacceptable.

Medicare for All is a good deal for American business!

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Business Leaders for Medicare for All

March 30, 2019

Watch Business Leaders for Medicare for All Chairman Richard Master, CEO of a $200 million a year company, explain why Medicare for All is such a good deal for American business.

Medicare For All Is Good For Business

This CEO of a $200 million a year company wants the business community to know: Medicare for all is good for business.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, March 27, 2019

An emotional plea for a woman’s right to choose

NowThis Politics

March 30, 2019

‘I’ve been pregnant 10 times. But I have only given birth twice.’

‘I have seen what many of you in here have called a heartbeat 10 times.’ — This lawmaker made an emotional plea for a woman’s right to choose by sharing her own emotional journey with pregnancy

Georgia State Senator Shares Personal Struggles with Pregnancy in Emotional Plea Against Severe Abortion Ban

'I have seen what many of you in here have called a heartbeat 10 times.' — This lawmaker made an emotional plea for a woman’s right to choose by sharing her own emotional journey with pregnancy

Posted by NowThis Election on Friday, March 29, 2019

No surprise: Trump appointee does not understand the basics of consumer protection

NowThis Politics

March 31, 2019

This rep exposed a Trump appointee for not understanding the basics of consumer protection.

This rep whipped out the textbook she wrote to school a Trump official on the basics of consumer protection and the dangers of payday loans.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) Uses Her Own Textbook to School Director of the CFPB on The Basics

This rep whipped out the textbook she wrote to school a Trump official on the basics of consumer protection and dangers of payday loans

Posted by NowThis Election on Friday, March 29, 2019

Why the sharing economy hurts workers!

Robert Reich
March 31, 2019
Corporations are trying to kill protections for workers in the gig economy. It’s estimated that soon over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such temporary or contract work. Here’s what we must do to ensure their rights are protected.

Why the Sharing Economy Hurts Workers

Corporations are trying to kill protections for workers in the gig economy. It’s estimated that soon over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such temporary or contract work. Here's what we must do to ensure their rights are protected.

Posted by Robert Reich on Sunday, March 31, 2019