Virtually nothing in Michael Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday surprised me because I had already written about the fact that Cohen and Trump lied about the Trump Tower Moscow project. In fact, in May, I said those lies were impeachable. The basic contours of the story were exposed that month in a BuzzFeed piece written by Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold, although I had been writing about it two weeks prior to their scoop. What happened yesterday was, on the surface at least, nothing but an acknowledgment by Cohen that the reporting in May had been correct, and that it meant that he had perjured himself before Congress.
In truth, you can go all the way back to a August 28, 2017 piece by Matt Apuzzo and Maggie Haberman in the New York Times to see the first contours of this story. I responded to the Times article at the time with Trump Has Been Lying About Russia and Felix Sater All Along. The main thing that was significant yesterday was that Michael Cohen agreed to tell the truth about his role in the saga, and also that he’s now in a cooperating role of some kind with the special counsel’s office.
It’s really the cooperation of Michael Cohen’s childhood friend Felix Sater that made this conviction possible. I have written about him a lot (see, e.g., Trump’s SoHo Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence), and he liked my My Movie Script on Felix Sater piece so much that he recently tried to contact me by email, LinkedIn and direct message on Twitter in an effort to convince me to go ahead with the project. He even offered to help.
Here’s the email portion of that outreach effort.
I’m not inclined to get involved with Felix Sater since one of his friends in that script got a public Bay Ridge, Brooklyn beatdown from a mafia associate and the other wound up in a penal colony in Siberia. But someone else should definitely go ahead and make the movie because it will be ten times better than Good Fellas.
The important thing is that he didn’t once suggest in any of his messages that I’d gotten anything wrong. He “lived the article” and thought it was great.
I confess that I get a little frustrated when I see CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin saying that never thought Trump might not survive his full term in office until he saw Cohen’s plea on Thursday. This is the biggest story in the world right now and Toobin seems shocked to learn a sparse amount of the details.
Then there’s former federal prosecutor Ken White in The Atlantic informing us that “these developments would, under normal circumstances, end a presidency” but “we’re numb to it all.”
I don’t actually think we’re numb to it all. I think we’ve had enough threads of the story for long enough to know that Trump cannot survive without the Senate Republicans setting a new world record for turning a blind eye. And the only reason that they might be able to get away with that is the same reason that these revelations came as a surprise to some of the people paid to cover this story. There’s a lot of folks who aren’t doing their jobs well enough to overcome the misinformation factories on the other side and force the American people to pay attention and understand.
I’m enjoying watching people jockeying for position to claim they were first to know how bad all this criminality is and where it might lead. I’ll give mad props to Seth Abramson for sounding the alarm from the get-go. His new book Proof of Collusion is perfectly timed. He has the whole sordid mess going back years documented. He took a huge amount of heat from all corners because he claimed every part of the Steele dossier was right. Glad to see him vindicated. Now if he would just stay in his lane and leave the electoral politics to the pros.
I have been following Seth Abramson on Twitter.
I am glad that his book is now getting a wider audience, and people will learn the details of Trump’s collusion.
But will any of this move the needle with the Republican Senate? Now that it is even more skewed for Republicans (53 vs. 51)? I am not sanguine.
This is not Lincoln’s Republican party, not even Nixon’s Republican senate. It is all Trump, all the way down the rabbit hole.
Better than Pence is my new mantra.
So tempted.
There’s a lot of folks who aren’t doing their jobs well enough to overcome the misinformation factories on the other side and force the American people to pay attention and understand.
I think you’re wrong here. The media can’t own up to the fact that one of the two major parties is basically an organized crime ring and has been since at least Nixon. Nixon. Iran-Contra(both Ray-gun and GHWB were implicated in that). C- Augustus & Iraq.
“Both parties.”
You meant ‘both parties’.
An obvious typo.
But not so fast ! Close the vise exquisitely slowly so we can get through the season.
Not until January. My fantasy politics has the entire criminal enterprise being swept away only after Nancy is third in line for the presidency.
Geez, BooMan, that email from Sater is really something. And your concluding paragraph here is particularly strong.
Thanks for your detailed detective work in sifting through public information during these years. I haven’t commented often in these type of threads because the failure of the media and other Americans to break away from the Both Sides narrative for one fucking moment has made me too furious to discuss these issues civilly.
So much at stake, and too many motherfuckers have pursued their own little narratives which have taken them away from the urgent tasks before us.
“Geez, BooMan, that email from Sater is really something.”
It is. My reaction to it would have been your approval fills me with shame.
An OOTS reference! LOVE the whole series. Are you a pen and paper gamer? I play Pathfinder even at age 51!
I used to be. Haven’t played D&D or other tabletop RPGs for 15 years or more. I now play MMOs.
I highly recommend finding a group. It’s so much more satisfying to play in person with smart, fun people around a table. But it can bet difficult to get the right group chemistry that lasts through months or years of real people’s life events. I live in a huge city like Los Angeles and it took a few years (and the internet!) to form the group I’m in now. But we play twice a month usually and have had campaigns lasting close to three years!
I don’t need to find a group. My wife and I play the same games and our computers are right next to each other. She also has a talent for finding good groups online, so I don’t need to look for them. I have one already.
Have you tried the Pathfinder: Kingmaker game? Didn’t get the best reviews because it was initially released in a pretty buggy state but I’ve really enjoyed it.
Also OOTS is awesome.
Not yet though my regular GM is really enjoying it too. I always think I’m going to like a video game, buy it, then lose interest after a few sessions. Maybe it’s having to get used to a whole new interface but I haven’t truly loved a video game (like I do tabletop RPGs) since Myst!
You know this better than I would Martin, but shouldn’t you redact Sater’s email address here? I’m not sure that information is publicly available.
It’s his work email.
Ok – I guess that makes sense, but it still just seems weird seeing it hanging out there.
I do find it remarkable how many Toobins are still out there. Whether they’re still resistant to using the words ‘lie or liar’ when commenting on a Trump episode and thinking that makes them somewhat more of a journalist than others who no longer hesitate to call out lies is painful and in the end demeaning of their profession.
Your pieces on Sater shamefully never got enough attention. They should have and thanks for the links, good to revisit them now.
“force the American people…”
Well, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. When prosecutor White intones “we’re numb to it”, the most realistic interpretation is that REPUBS are numb to it all. Non-Repubs clearly have a much greater acceptance of the criminality of Der Trumper, and frankly, National Trumpalism in general. But for a Repub voter to turn on him now when so much of this was apparent in July 2016 only makes clear what credulous fools they were, although this realization is likely submerged in their subconscious.
And frankly, for a strong majority of National Trumpalists (The 46%), his consistent hatred and harassment of Latinos and other minorities absolutely outweighs any level of criminality (likely even treason), however clearly proven. Plus, they are safely behind the impenetrable Fox force field.
The Repub party (upon its capture by the “conservative” movement) long ago abdicated its role as a responsible national institution, and the Coaches of Team Conservative aren’t going to change of their own volition now. All their yapping about “patriotism” and the “honor” of the nation is just so much polluted hot air–as the disgusting spectacle of the past 2 years has shown, quite conclusively.
Since half the nation (or so) identifies with “conservatism”, it’s not really a surprise that the Mueller investigation is now underwater in the last opinion poll around the time of the election. Psychologically, once one’s mind is categorically made up, more and more counter-evidence only makes the believer dig their heels in further—see global warming. This is the path public opinion will likely take as Mueller soldiers on. And since absolutely NO elected Repub is any kind of national leader, the Addison McConnells, John Corndogs and Lindsey Gs will simply work to reinforce the prevailing view among the base, and then conform their actions to it.
One cannot say that the corporate media hasn’t engaged in extensive reporting on Putingate, the difficulty is the complexity of the con and the massive dramatis personae. It’s a Tolstoyesk collection of fools, knaves and high commanders, from Grand Vizier Putin to Repub coffee-spill wipers (usually married to Russian gals), and one basically can’t keep the players straight. The fault of the TV media lies in not keeping the story on the front burner, or providing context and recaps—i.e. “the story so far is…”). Nixon had long since resigned by now in Watergate, and that was supposedly a slow-moving story. Congressional Repub screen plays of every Trumper misdeed has dragged things out endlessly.
Unfortunately, the complete destruction of the federal government by the “conservative” movement makes an actual adjudication of (let alone accountability for) Der Trumper’s crimes against the nation inconceivable. The (irreversible) pollution of the brains of The 46% is almost irrelevant.
Maybe lived isn’t a typo.
It’s not.
That’s clear from his other communications with me.
I have always believed it would be the reveal of some RICO/money laundering mess that would end the donald. Not the stuff he did before he ran for president. The continuation of laundering money while he ran for president. Maybe even after he took the oath of office. Hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Beltway media reaction to the ongoing Trump chaos is a bit like Upton Sinclair’s famous statement: “You cannot get a man to understand something if he is being paid to not understand it.”
This all will come down to Senate Republicans. You have faith that they will step up and finally do the right thing.From what I have perceived about them in recent years, I am not very hopeful. Needless to say, I sure hope you are right on this.We are heading for a showdown on the Russia probe sooner rather than later I think, so we shall soon see.
I agree. If they can steal a Supreme Court seat in broad daylight and suffer no consequences why would they show any morality now?
Excellent commentary.