The president’s worst day yet. Will it change anything?
by digby
Ever since Donald Trump glided down that golden escalator three years ago it has seemed as though each news cycle is more surreal than the last one. But every once in a while something happens that breaks through the dizzying cascade of crazy tweets, palace intrigue and incoherent, destructive policies. Yesterday was one of those times. Two separate, serious legal proceedings unfolded over the course of several hours, leaving the weirdly unfamiliar impression that something real and recognizable had happened.
What was already a very bad week, turned into a full-scale trainwreck for President Trump. At virtually the same moment, in New York Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight felonies and in Virginia Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman, was found guilty of eight felonies.
In his allocution, Cohen told the court that in addition to his own criminal tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations, his former employer Donald Trump had illegally directed him to pay hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Trump’s former mistress Karen McDougal to keep them quiet in the weeks before the 2016 election. (I should note that Trump is referred to as “Individual-1” in the document but it’s clear that it’s him, since the document states, “in or about January 2017, Cohen left the Company and began holding himself out as the “personal attorney” to Individual-1, who at that point had become the president of the United States.“)
The plea deal indicates that the prosecutors had plenty of corroborating evidence, including audio tapes, to convict Cohen should he have gone to trial. It doesn’t specify whether or not this corroborating evidence applies specifically to the president but one can assume there is something since we’ve already heard Trump and Cohen on tape in close proximity to the election talking about how to funnel hush money so it’s fair to conclude that they did not simply take Cohen’s word for it. And it’s clear now that rather than the publisher of the National Enquirer paying McDougal off as an act of friendship toward Donald Trump by buying her story and then not running it (a so-called “catch and kill”) it was always a transactional arrangement whereby Trump would simply pass the money through the tabloid. It was even more unscrupulous than we knew.
Nobody knows exactly why Cohen didn’t sign a cooperation agreement. According to Vanity Fair, this plea deal came together very quickly so one could speculate that since Cohen’s lawyer Guy Petrillo used to be in charge of the criminal division in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, a certain level of trust exists between the legal teams and they could be working together after the fact. In any case, Cohen’s other lawyer Lanny Davis went on TV last night and made it clear that Cohen has a lot to say to any prosecutors who care to listen:
Lanny Davis: “Mr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.” pic.twitter.com/NxPmShwunw— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) August 22, 2018
He also hinted broadly that Cohen could say that Trump had advance knowledge of “hacking”, although it’s unclear which hacking he was talking about. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin pointed out that a Democratic House or the Special Prosecutor could give Cohen immunity without fear of jeopardizing prosecution now that he’s pleaded guilty adding, “that means Cohen would have to testify in grand jury and before Congress in public. We will hear more from Cohen.”
Meanwhile, down in Virginia a jury found Paul Manafort guilty of eight of the eighteen counts charged against him also having to do with tax evasion, bank fraud and failing to file foreign bank account reports. The jury deadlocked on ten counts but Manafort certainly can’t find anything to celebrate in that. He’s going to prison for years. Now he’s facing his second trial which will be held in Washington next month and will deal with lying to the FBI, money laundering and foreign lobbying. His lawyer yesterday said that he would be “evaluating all his options.”
This would explain why on his way to a rally in West Virginia, Trump had nothing to say about his former lawyer Michael Cohen but he couldn’t say enough good things about the man who has so far refused to cooperate, Paul Manafort:
“Nothing to do with Russian collusion, continue with the witch hunt.” Trump briefly talks Manafort; mum on Cohen. pic.twitter.com/8x8YswReFQ— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2018
You can’t help but wonder why he is being so very kind to Paul Manafort who, after all, isn’t being tried on any charges relating to the Trump campaign. One might even suspect that Manafort has some information Trump would like him to keep to himself in exchange for a pardon.
It was an exciting day and the news cycle was filled with predictions that this would shake loose Republican officials’ complacency once and for all. The president had been implicated in a felony and yet another pair of top associates were guilty of serious criminal behavior. Surely this would break the spell and members of the establishment would rise up and do their duty.
Maybe.
But we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Time after time, some outrage or incident would be expected to bring him down and yet he’s still in the most powerful office in the world, making mess after mess while his enfeebled party follows blindly. After all, it was only a few days ago that dozens of elder statesmen of the Intelligence Community and members of the military spoke out in unison to protest the president’s decision to revoke former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance and a senator’s response was to back the president and call Brennan a “butthead.”
Last night, the right wing reaction on Fox News and social media was to say that even if Trump committed a little campaign finance felony or two, it’s no big deal since everybody breaks campaign finance laws. Paying hush money to porn stars and playmates to keep them quiet before an election is also standard operating procedure apparently. And some supporters are downright excited that all this will help get out the vote:
NEW: Ex-Trump aide Steve Bannon tells me:“Today clarifies that November is a referendum on impeachment — an up or down vote.
“Every Trump supporter needs to get with the program.”
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) August 22, 2018
Nonetheless, yesterday was likely Trump’s worst day in office (so far.) It certainly seemed so at his rally in West Virginia where he was distracted and enervated, whining about “elites” saying”I’m smarter than they are. I have many much more beautiful homes than they do. I have a better apartment at the top of Fifth Avenue. Why the hell are they ‘the elite?’ …To me, I’m insulted.”
On a day in which two more of Trump’s close associates found out they would be spending years in prison and the president himself is implicated in a federal crime, the crowd lustily cheered him up with a rousing round of “lock her up.”
.