GUILTY

Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort convicted on 8 counts of fraud (AP)

Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty
Former Trump personal lawyers admits to Campaign Violations, Tax Fraud and Bank Fraud (NYT)

Photo credit: Pogo, Trail Mix Contributor (8/20/2018)

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Author: craigcrawford

Trail Mix Host. Lapsed journalist, author & retired pundit happily promoting nothing but the truth for Social Security checks.

57 thoughts on “GUILTY”

  1. BFD no?  Dumbass’ LAWYER pleads and campaign mgr found guilty. Only the best. Let’s sit back and wait for the tweet, pardons and Trudy alternative truths. JHC , what will it take before the 34% (Morans) to see the light?

  6. “ in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” made illegal campaign contributions. As Poobah said,  BOOM!

    Bwahahahahahah…,,

  9. Exciting day!

    What connection to Russian Collusion?

    Now that we all know of the tarnish side of Trump is confirmed, what is new?

    Hillary and Brennan are next in Mueller’s sights!

  10. Ping, my man, Hillary and Brennan are next? You are delusional. Either that or you’re buying Dotard’s LIES. You are smarter than that, at least I thought so. If you believe his crap buy a trailer in Slapout, AL and get on the trump train.

    Collusion?  Straw man created by IMPOTUS to be knocked down by his “lawyers.”  The inquiry was into Russian interference in the 2016 election.  Special prosecutors are bound to refer any criminal wrongdoing uncovered in the course of their investigations even if the crimes are not directly related to the initial investigation.  But nice try – have you auditioned for a Faux show?  You should.

    Oh, and he DENIED any affair with Stormy and Karen.

  13. Hullo, Ping. Just be patient. The priority as I see it right now is delaying any votes on Supreme Court nominees until after the November election. At that point I believe it likely that Trump will be unable to stack the Court in his favor. Having a somewhat fairly balanced Court is like having an honest deck–it builds trust in the system; something that I think we lack.

    Are you spending much time at sea?

  15. Craig…  Pogo…  Bink…  thanks for the answers to my question.

    Just got back from celebrating at our favorite Italian restaurant on the way home from the medical center.  Rick had some blood tests.  The celebration was because Rick does NOT have cancer!

    Now I’m gonna celebrate the twit’s upcoming demise…

  16. FOX has spent the first 15 minutes of their 7pm newscast on the Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, killed by an illegal immigrant, no mention yet of Cohen or Manafort.

  17. “The President just became an unindicted co-conspirator.” — GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley on Cohen confession that Trump directed hush payments to protect his campaign. (FOX NEWS)

  18. I really wish the trial had been televised; I want to be able to judge the fairness of the happenings in a courtroom, the body language of the principals, and to sense whether or not they’re getting ready to feed the kangaroos.

  19. No Russia  No Russia No Trump and Russia No Collusion

    I can tweet like IMPOTUS

  20. I have a different opinion of Judge Ellis. He read the grand jury indictments, saw the FBI list of bank and IRS exhibits, saw the list of expert witnesses, and quickly figured out that even a jury made up entirely of soft-hearted grannies would vote to convict manyfraud.

    Having arrived at that assessment, the Judge just wanted to get an early tee time.

  22. Poobah, yep I took the pic yesterday. The guy was having a great time – I bet he will be dancing in the street tomorrow. Mrs. P thought it was me at first.

  24. From WaPo:

    According to court filings, Cohen used a line of credit for the Daniels payment that he obtained through a fraudulent loan application in 2015.

    In January 2017, after Trump’s election, he sought reimbursement for the Daniels payment from Trump. Unnamed executives at the Trump Organization directed that Cohen be paid $420,000, which would reimburse him for his payment, along with additional money for taxes and expenses and a $60,000 bonus, filings said. One executive told another to falsely describe the fees as legal expenses and describe the first two monthly payments as a “retainer,” according to court papers.

    A Trump Organization spokesman declined to comment.

    I’ll bet.

  28. and from the peanut gallery –

    the guardian:

     

    Senior Republicans hesitate to criticise Trump after Manafort and Cohen verdicts

    [….]
    n a statement, a spokesperson for Speaker Paul Ryan said: “We are aware of Mr Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges. We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”
     
    Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an erstwhile Trump critic turned golf partner, emphasized that both cases had nothing to do with Russia. “The American legal system is working its will in both the Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen cases,” Graham said in a statement.
    “Thus far, there have yet to be any charges or convictions for colluding with the Russian government by any member of the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. It’s important to let this process continue without interference. I hope Mr Mueller can conclude his investigation sooner rather than later for the benefit of the nation.”
     
    John Cornyn, the number two ranking Republican in the Senate echoed Graham’s comments on Tuesday. According to CNN, he told reporters: “If Manafort and Cohen did things that [they] shouldn’t have done, which it sounds like they did, I think they ought to be held responsible for it but I don’t see any of this having anything to do with the president and Russia.”
     
    However, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who has long been one of the few Republicans willing to consistently break with Trump on policy grounds, offered direct criticism of Cohen and Manafort. “Paul Manafort is a founding member of the DC swamp and Michael Cohen is the Gotham version of the same,” said Sasse. “Neither one of these felons should have been anywhere near the presidency.”
     

    [….]
    Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the New York Times who has embraced the label “never Trump”, did tweet: “I’ve been skeptical about the wisdom and merit of impeachment. Cohen’s guilty plea changes that. The president is clearly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. He should resign his office or be impeached and removed from office.”
     
    Former top Trump aide Steve Bannon told the Guardian the rulings would have implications for the mid-term elections. “Tonight brings November into complete focus,” he said. “It will be an up or down vote on the impeachment of the president. The Democrats have long wanted this fight and now they have it.”

  30. wapo:  Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis suggests his client has knowledge implicating Trump in ‘criminal conspiracy’ to hack Democratic emails

    […]
    That raised the question of whether Cohen would cooperate, and, crucially, what his cooperation would be worth.
     
    One possible answer came into view the very same day, as Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, suggested on television — and in an interview with The Washington Post late Tuesday — that Cohen had knowledge “of interest” to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and that his client was “more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.”
    Davis said that Cohen’s knowledge reached beyond “the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude” and included also the question of Trump’s participation in a “criminal conspiracy” to hack into the emails of Democratic officials during the 2016 election.
     
    On “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Davis, who is a veteran of the Clinton White House, said his client had “knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”
     
    It was already clear, Davis said, that Trump “publicly cheered it on” — an apparent reference to then-candidate Trump’s appeal to Russia in July 2016 to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The question that Trump’s former attorney might be able to answer, Davis said, is “did he also have private information?”
    Davis said he chose his words carefully so as not to violate attorney-client privilege by revealing the specifics of what Cohen had told him.
     
    “I know everyone’s interested in the same question: What does [Cohen] know and is it going to be harmful to Trump?” Davis told the Post. “The script that I worked out very carefully so I’m not revealing what Mr. Cohen told me is that I believe that what he knows in some respects regarding the subject of the Mueller investigation would be of interest.”
    [….]
    But Davis noted, as have others, that what “Donald Trump and all of his henchmen miss when they say ‘no collusion, no collusion, no collusion’” is the issue of criminal conspiracy, which he distinguished from collusion. (For the record, Davis said he thinks there was also collusion, meaning “active coordination between people in the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.”)
     
    “A conspiracy to commit a crime becomes a crime if there’s one overt act — meaning you do anything to implement the crime,” Davis added. “So if there is a conversation and a plan for there to be dirt on Hillary Clinton, and then someone knows the way you’re willing to get the dirt is a Russian agent called WikiLeaks… and then WikiLeaks hacks into an email account, which is a crime, then you have committed a crime of conspiracy.”
     
    A crime of conspiracy, he maintained, “could mean that somebody knows about a crime about to be committed and doesn’t call the FBI.”
    Davis said Cohen’s possible knowledge of criminal conspiracy was not limited to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump, Jr., and Kremlin-aligned lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The heavily scrutinized encounter, Davis said, “requires an overt act to be criminal.” Earlier this month, Trump acknowledged that the purpose of the meeting was to “get information on an opponent” but said the method was “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”

    Davis told The Post there were other instances, involving overt acts, about which Cohen had knowledge “of interest to Mr. Mueller.” He added, though, again emphasizing attorney-client privilege, that he was “only saying it’s a possibility.”
     

  32. Flatus – I miss Court TV too.

    One take on the Manafort verdicts is that the jurers could not put it all together on the complex counts, but sure said “that rich bastard did not pay his taxes – I have to every year, well here you go crook” on the simple tax counts.  That tells the prosecutor that a better education is needed during the trial.  Good to know on the retrial and also on the trials that will follow on other criminals in the SFB cult.

    It is hard to not put together fun songs –

    (to the tune of I’m Dreaming of a white Christmas) I’m dreaming of a new Watergate, just like the Watergate I knew. . .

     

  33. I think we need to define a couple of more crimes for cases such as these (to include Trump, et alia): Venality and Penilism.

  34. his lawyer Lanny Davis and his friend Donny Deutsch are saying how Cohen has a sense of relief now.

    good timing on Michael’s part as we’re in that time of year – Islam’s eid al-adha now and Judaism’s high holy days coming up – when confession is seen as good for the soul.

     

  35. npr:

     
    Less than a day after Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts in a federal court — ranging from tax evasion to campaign finance violations — Trump’s longtime attorney and fixer is downplaying the possibility of a pardon. In fact, Cohen’s own lawyer, Lanny Davis, says he would outright reject one if it were granted.
     
    “I know that Mr. Cohen would never accept a pardon from a man that he considers to be both corrupt and a dangerous person in the oval office,” Davis tells NPR’s Rachel Martin, referring to the president later in the interview as a “criminal.”
     
    “And [Cohen] has flatly authorized me to say under no circumstances would he accept a pardon from Mr. Trump,” Davis added, “who uses the pardon power in a way that no president in American history has ever used a pardon — to relieve people of guilt who committed crimes, who are political cronies of his.”
    [….]

    “Mr. Cohen is not interested in being dirtied by a pardon from such a man,” Davis added.

    […]
    “He has not pled guilty to a crime, but his own lawyers have described him directing somebody to do something that is a criminal act — which is to hush up his affairs with two women,” Davis says. “And that’s not what this is about: It’s about his hushing up those affairs in order to influence the outcome of an election.”
     
    In that respect — special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — Davis says Cohen has valuable information as well, without going into detail about what exactly that information may be.
     
    “If he tells the truth to the special counsel who talks to him, and I believe he will,” Davis says, “he will have topics that in my opinion will be of interest to the special counsel in his Russian investigation and related topics.”

  38. It’s great to read Mr Ping again. I hope he sticks around to explain all the things that will be happening over the next year.

    Lance the boil. Drain his swamp.

  39. the guardian:
    Trump on hush money payments: ‘They came from me’
     

    Trump has sat down for an interview with Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt. In the teaser for the interview Trump says he knew about the payments Cohen made to silence the women from speaking publicly about affairs they said they had with him only “later on”.
    “They weren’t taken out of campaign finance, that’s the big thing. that’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come from the campaign. They came from me,” Trump says in the interview when asked about the payments.
    This directly contradicts what Cohen said in court on Tuesday. While pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, Cohen alleged that he “worked in coordination with and at the direction of” then-candidate Trump to arrange payments to two women during the 2016 campaign.

     

  42. and on another front
    abc news:
    Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who’s suing president Donald Trump for defamation, is requesting more information on Trump’s other accusers before the lawsuit goes to trial.

    [….]

    Zervos filed the lawsuit in January 2017, just before Trump’s inauguration, alleging that Trump made defamatory statements when he accused her and other women who made similar allegations of lying while on the campaign trail.

    […]
    In court documents filed Tuesday, Zervos and her legal team requested pre-trial evidence from the dozen other women who’ve reported similar accounts of sexual misconduct by Trump as well as “any other women who have made such complaints to or about” Trump, either privately or publicly.
     
    The information is relevant to proving Trump “made his defamatory statements with common-law malice” and that he acted with “actual malice,” according to the lawsuit.
    Since Trump “insisted unequivocally that he had never inappropriately touched any woman,” information on his other accusers would be “directly relevant” to see “whether his statements about Ms. Zervos were substantially true as a whole,” the court documents state.
    In addition, the information requested is “potentially relevant” because “of the distinct patterns of behavior that have emerged,” such as “luring women to the Beverly Hills Hotel under false pretenses” and “groping women in the precise manner described the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” according to the lawsuit.
    “Information about these other women is material and necessary to rebut the defense that each of the defamatory statements was substantially true,” the court document states.

     

  43. wapo:  What might Michael Cohen tell Robert Mueller?

    […]

    Cohen is a prominent figure in the dossier of reports written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which was first published by BuzzFeed last year. This dossier has become a focal point of questions about Russian interference and any cooperation the Trump campaign may have provided. Trump’s defenders justifiably point out that the dossier is full of allegations for which there’s no outside evidence. It is, in short, a collection of things Steele heard from his sources meant to spur further investigation
    In the context of this week’s developments, it’s worth walking through what Steele’s reports indicate about Cohen and the extent to which any of the assertions have been validated.
     
    Cohen, the reports claim, played “a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.” The documents allege that Cohen stepped into the role of primary liaison with Russia in August 2016 after Paul Manafort resigned from the campaign following new reports about his relationship with a pro-Russian politician in Ukraine. Cohen, a report from October reads, “was heavily engaged in a cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of [Trump’s] relationship with Russia being exposed.”
    Per “a Kremlin insider” who spoke with Steele, Cohen met with “Kremlin representatives” in August or September of that year in Prague. That alleged meeting may have taken place at Rossotrudnichestvo, a Russian center for science and culture in the city. Attendees may have included Konstantin Kosachev, a member of the upper chamber of Russia’s legislature, and Oleg Solodukhin, who works for Rossotrudnichestvo. Steele’s reports indicate that the meeting was originally supposed to be in Moscow, but that was judged too risky.
    Another report indicates that Cohen was accompanied by “3 colleagues” to the meeting. The agenda included questions about how “deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the [Hillary Clinton] campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the [Trump] team more generally.” The dossier alleges that Cohen was aware of a company that had targeted Democratic leaders by planting bugs and stealing data. In the meeting, the two sides allegedly agreed to protect that operation and to have “Romanian hackers” be paid off and cease their work.
     
    We can overlay any number of theories onto this presentation of what might have happened. The initial release of files stolen from the Democratic National Committee involved a Russian intelligence officer claiming to be Romanian, for example, though that was publicly known at the time of Steele’s report. The government’s description of Cohen’s crimes released in conjunction with his plea deal on Tuesday includes a reimbursement to Cohen of $50,000 for “ ’tech services,’ which in fact related to work COHEN had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign.” It’s not clear what that was.
    All of it, though, stems from Cohen having traveled to Prague in the late summer of 2016. In April, McClatchy reported that Mueller’s team uncovered evidence of such a visit, but that hasn’t been otherwise confirmed.
     
    Obviously, Cohen might be able to do so.
     
    The fairest assumption is that the dossier’s allegations are more likely untrue than true. Cohen may not have any information about any link between the Trump campaign and Russia that’s more serious than what’s known publicly. He may have information that adds a little shading to the picture of what happened but doesn’t offer anything earth-shattering.
     
    On Tuesday, though, Cohen did make an unexpected assertion of remarkable significance: that Trump told him to take actions that violated campaign finance laws. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he could offer something significant to Mueller, too.
     

  45. I’m sorry about my crude comment, supra. I don’t know of any creature that carries mandibles, teeth or radulae in or around the anal pore. Therefore, it is quite possible that the proverbial dung-consuming grin is merely an ex-urban legend.

  46. I wish the Mexican soccer announcer would come on America tv everytime someone pleads or is convicted and yell

    GUILTY!!!!!

    IMPOTUS  doesn’t understand campaign finance violations at all!!!!!!! He thinks because the campaign didn’t supply the money it is not a violation.   Lying blah blah blah

  47. x-r,  that  plan B (you linked above) had better raise more than just eyebrows.  headline sends chills:

    A Russian Oligarch Bought Maryland’s Election Vendor. Now These Senators Are Questioning the Rules

  48. “He thinks because the campaign didn’t supply the money it is not a violation”

    kgc, from what I heard today, he wasn’t the only one not up-to-date on the election laws.  they all seem to forget the reporting requirement.   makes me think there are a lot of goper critters who might be in violation themselves.

  49. clever line of the day:  “My sense is that Avenatti is going to be able to get his white whale,” said Andy Wright, a former litigator and an associate White House counsel in the Obama administration.

  50.  

    “Bink, The acceptance of a pardon is tantamount to the admission of the crime.“ -pogo

    i defer to you, ofc, but after some cursory research, and like all things concerning the office of the President, these days, it’s up for debate.

  51. Bink, Burdick v. US, 236 U.S.  79 (1915). The only question is whether the discussion of the imputation of guilt by acceptance of a pardon is nothing more than dicta. To date the Court has never squarely addressed the issue. Eugene Volokh, RW law prof agrees that the acceptance of a pardon signifies an admission of guilt.

  52. XR, LMAO at the jawbone of an asshole comment. Please retract the subsequent comment apologizing for the crude [fucking hilarious IMHO] comment. I consider the prior jawbone comment to be in the top 10% of clever turns of a phrase in recent memory.

  53. That Volokh piece doesn’t support that, pogo- from the last paragraph:

    “Legal authorities, then, are split on the subject of how the law should understand pardons; but because some pardons are understood as being based on the pardoned person’s factual innocence, I doubt that any judge today would genuinely view acceptance of pardon as always being an admission of guilt.” -Volokh

  54. michael cohen confessed to conspiring with two top trump campaign officials to commit felonies. Please, dear G!D, let one of those co-conspiritor felons be the Vice Usurper, mike pence. Please, please, puhleeeeeeeeeeeeaaaazz !

  55. Under trump, people who commit a misdemeanor lose their children, but gangsters who are convicted of 8 FELONIES are called ‘good people’, who deserve to be left alone so they can make ten$ of M!LL!ON$ of $$$ working for putin overturning democratic countries like the US and Ukraine.
    Drain trump Swamp. Lock him up. Lock them ALL up.
     

  57. So many witches !   Maybe the ripoffs should stop holding conventions and just have covens.

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