Late Friday afternoon, the Southern District of New York’s and the Special Counsel’s sentencing memoranda on Michael Cohen were released, along with the Special Counsel’s breach determination in respect to their plea deal with Paul Manafort. Collectively, they probably did not live up to the hype, but that’s really only because the crimes detailed within are comparatively minor compared to many of the more serious crimes that have been alleged.
Of the three, the most immediately damaging is the Southern District’s submission. And that’s because it accuses the president of the United States of having knowingly committed multiple campaign finance related felonies and then spells out precisely why these crimes are so damning. In short, Donald Trump defrauded the American people by illegally denying them vital information they needed to make an informed choice on Election Day in 2016. If he were not presently serving as our president, Donald Trump would assuredly be prosecuted for these crimes exactly as Michael Cohen has been, and as the ringmaster and beneficiary of the conspiracy, his sentence would be the more severe.
Paying off a porn star and Playboy bunny to conceal his infidelity might not be seen as the kind of high crime envisioned in the Constitution of meriting impeachment, but this case is complicated by its consequence for the very outcome of the election and by the subsequent coverup that took place while Trump was in office. The prospect is very real that Donald Trump would not be the president at all if he had not committed these crimes, and his criminal conduct in office is more serious than his criminal conduct on the campaign trail.
Truthfully, however, this is still relatively small potatoes in the greater scheme of things and it alone is not going to convince the Senate Republicans to march up Pennsylvania Avenue and ask Trump to pack his bags.
There are more serious implications in all three of today’s court filings that relate to Michael Cohen’s seeming fear of organized crime and Russian intelligence, as well as Trump, Manafort and Cohen’s dealings with Kremlin-connected Russian figures. Unfortunately, most of this is left to our imaginations as what was revealed was not particularly fulsome, other parts were redacted, and still other parts remain under seal.
I will try to unpack some of that in coming days, but for now we have to sit with the fact that the president of the United States is accused by the Southern District of New York of having led a felonious conspiracy that probably was necessary in order for him to win election.
‘Bout time!!!
So here I am at about 10PM EST Friday, idly flipping through the TV channels in the hopes of finding something…ANYTHING…interesting and yet not paranoia-producing. I am going to sleep early, because tomorrow I need to get up early and drive 100+ miles (plus pick up two other NYC musicians) to go play the wonderful Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn version of Tchaikovsky’s equally wonderful Nutcracker Suite. It’s an all-day affair..travel, rehearse, perform, travel. The last thing I need is more worry about the future of this country to keep me awake.
I would say that over the past…oh, maybe 10 or 12 years, probably much longer…I have spent a total of about 7.5 minutes paying any attention whatsoever to Fox News. It usually takes me only a few seconds to turn away from the noxious gasbags who work there, if for no other reason than the timbre of their whining, screeching, totally brain-dead “HOTTEST THING EVER!!!” voices.
But…something made me stop on Fox. I think it was the look on the faces of the anchors as they dutifully trotted out today’s bad news for Trump. Or maybe it was the looks on the faces of clips of Manafort, Cohen and…most wonderfully…Donald Trump, all of whom looked exactly as if they had just been blindsided upside the head by somebody with a hefty baseball bat and good knowledge of how to use it.
All those faces said the same thing that Wolf Blitzer’s face said on Election Eve, 2016.
Well fancy that!!!
AG
P.S. My favorite Micheal Ray Richardson quote (He was a wonderful pro basketball player and personality…and yes, that’s how he spelled his first name.) is “The ship be sinking” quote. He said it near the end of his career with the…at that time…woeful NY Knicks..
Yup.
Sky’s the limit here as well.
An event horizon kind of limit.
I repeat:
“…the boundary at which the gravitational pull of a massive object becomes so great as to make escape impossible.”
Trump has now produced his own black hole, a place from which from which there is no possibility of escape or return. He can flip and flap and mindfart and tweedle day and night…no one other than his fellow black hole dwellers will be affected any longer.
His act has now become not fake news anymore…it’s much worse that that, especially for a narcissist on Trump’s level.
It’s old news!!!
His ratings will start to skid, just like those of any other tired, old, Reality TV star.
Watch.
Even Fox News couldn’t put the whitewash on this day.
To bed…peaceful in the knowledge that we will soon have a new group of hustlers fake newsing us. I’m beginning to believe that this is the best we can do. Let them all hang themselves with their various lies. The best thing we can do is to try to hurry up the process.
Well, it’s not like we’re hearing that Michael Cohen went to Prague.
On the other hand, AG seems to think that Trump is going down, so there’s that.
The fact is that pretty much everyone who matters knows that it is our president, and not the previous secretary of state, who is “dumb as a brick”, and as soon as the economy stops being the best we’ve seen in 20 years (already happening if you are in the stock market), Mr. 42% is going to become Mr. 22% right quick.
Also…one thing that came to mind after one of your previous posts…it really doesn’t matter if we convince 67 senators to convict. The real action will be in the House, when we make the impeachment case. If it’s strong, this will doom the republicans in 2020. In a way, it might be better if they don’t convict. Make them defend Trump and then go down choking on it.
This / is where it’s at.
But Dumb Fuck Chuck said yesterday in the WaPo that we should make an infrastructure deal with the President. No mention of crimes or impeachment. Geez, according to Chuck, Trump is just another NY businessman. Of course we should make a deal with him… he always acts in good faith…
So, I ask, how do we rid ourselves of Trump with an utterly useless Democratic leadership?
The democratic leadership line is for members to shut up about impeachment and “focus on business.” And while I understand the thought process that impeaching the president in the House may be meaningless if “justice” is the goal when there is no chance of conviction in the Senate and removal from office, the democrats run the risk of marginalizing themselves as a party in our political system by refusing to even talk about taking any action out of fear of political consequences. And “political consequences” is the root of this entire, sorry saga.
The democrats haven’t come out and explicitly stated something to the effect, “we want to look forward, not back” as they did in 2006 when they took over and Bush W’s crimes with respect to the Iraq war were staring the nation in the face. But the insistence on focusing on “bipartisan deals” on an infrastructure plan and other legislation, with a “president” who’s been credibly charged with committing two felonies to win the election (and there’s clearly more to come) thereby raising serious questions about his legitimacy, the party run the risk of spending the next two years marginalizing itself as an institution that can be counted on to stand up for justice and the rule of law when it is being challenged as never before.
I know the thought process: let’s stay out of Mueller’s way and under the radar (e.g. the tried and true dem strategy of if we keep quiet they won’t notice us but somehow the voters will and we’ll win) and let him do his thing, and let the chips fall where they may, and meanwhile we’ll focus on “bipartisan” legislation (as if…) to do good things for the country. But here’s the rub: any such legislation has about as much chance of getting serious consideration in the Senate as Trump has of being convicted by it, so the next two years could end with not only little accomplishment on the legislative front, but little notable action and accomplishment as well on the accountability front. Sure, the dem committee chairs are talking about getting his tax returns, subpoenaing Don Jr, etc., but they have so many options to snow ball and slow walk that process that 2020 could arrive without anything significant having been accomplished.
Make no mistake about it: the 2018 “blue wave” was not because the democrats put forward thinking policies out there that excited the hell out of the public to the extent they came out like never before. No, the wave happened because people are sick and tired of Trump and the republicans abusing this country and its people, and making us all look like fools on the world stage, and the democratic party is the one institution voters have some measure of control over to do their will, which in 2018 clearly was to have congress be the check and balance its supposed to be, and hold Trump accountable.
If the dems fuck with that, e.g. leadership doing their usual “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” act that they do so well, as they appear to be working on, 2020 might not end well for them, and us. As severe as this sounds, democratic leadership needs to realize that, they are no longer dealing with “friends across the aisle” but a corrupt political organization inculcated with a culture of criminality, bent on maintaining power by any means necessary, and they have to treat them as such.
There was a lot of progressive-side advice not too long ago telling Democrats not to talk about Russia. So the Democratic leadership lays back on it, and now we are getting upset? An infrastructure plan probably is not going to happen anyway.
I don’t seem to recall that Progressive-side advice… or do you count Pelosi as a “progressive”?
. . . any meaningful meaning (not much, in my view), of course I consider her one!
More to the point, though, I think it a silly and counter-productive argument to start in the first place, given what a cowardly and Banana-Republican-propaganda-serving term I consider “progressive” to be in current usage*. (Just look at all the endless, pointless arguments around here among people claiming private ownership of the litmus test for “true progressive”!)
*As I’ve stated here more than once: I see “progressive” as the label many actual liberals fled to in quite cowardly fashion when Newt, Rove et al. so successfully ran a decades-long-now campaign to turn “liberal” — which actually is an honorable political philosophy, on which this nation was founded, responsible for all social progress in our history, and still favored by majorities polled about specific tenets/policies instead of the now-demonized label — into a pejorative.
See my comment above, NJersey.
Trump will wear out his welcome. Already has, really. Only his diehard supporters and the media maintain some semblance of interest in him, and the mainstream neocentrist media are mostly only in it now for their clickbait profit.
You will notice that said media almost completely refuse to cover WWE-style pro wrestling. It’s not because that particular showtime is fake, it’s because it is only of interest to a devolved, mainly lower middle class audience. No money in it. They’d have to subsist on Walmart ads, and Walmart doesn’t much need to advertise, certainly not in the NY Times or CNN. It already has its clientele pretty well all locked up.
You ask “…how do we rid ourselves of Trump with an utterly useless Democratic leadership?”
I answered this question above:
Schumer?
More old news.
He’ll fade away even more quickly than will Trump.
2020?
(@)(@)
<—–>
We shall see.
Won’t we.
More Deep State/Dark State-supported hustlers?
On both sides of the duopoly fence?
Could be…
One of the plusses of the ever-increasing speed of social media is that assholes seem to be getting worn out more and more quickly.
It took Trump about 4 years of being continually in the public eye to start to turn into old news.
Next election cycle? Unless of course someone truly authentic manages to get a presidential nomination?
It’ll be quicker.
Watch.
AG
Local councils of soldiers, peasants and workers, is my preference, but then, I’m a stickler for tradition.
Nice straw man.
C’mon man, get with the times.
Jacobin Correspondence Committees.
court filings that relate to Michael Cohen’s seeming fear of organized crime and Russian intelligence…
This is the only news site that I have seen make this point. Apparently Cohen hasn’t been 100% cooperative, because he’s trying to protect himself and his family.
It really is like the story of a mob informant.
Cohen grew up surrounded by the Russian mafia in NY. His uncle ran a bar that was the HQ for the mafia. So he is deeply knowledgeable about them and undoubtedly worked with them on some sketchy stuff. That’s also the connection that got Cohen involved with Trump att least 10 years ago. So Cohen has very good reasons to fear them.
Folks, instead of turning this thread into silly bash-Pelosi nonsense, actually read the Southern District’s sentencing memorandum. Pages 15-16 state quite clearly and simply that Michael Cohen’s cooperation with prosecutors has been less than what they expect from someone wishing to take full ownership of his crimes.
Pelosi bashing? Chuck’s the one with a penis and bifocals always lodged at the end of his nose… as if he’s always contemplating how to make his next press release so meaningless and pretentious as to turn off the entire media and 90% of the American population at first glance. He’s the one who published the article in the WaPo that suggested Dems could strike a deal with a lying criminal.
Pelosi bashing? Chuck’s the one with a penis and bifocals always lodged at the end of his nose… as if he’s always contemplating how to make his next press release so meaningless and pretentious as to turn off the entire media and 90% of the American population at first glance. He’s the one who published the article in the WaPo that suggested Dems could strike a deal with a lying criminal.
Sorry all you Cuck fans out there… only meant to post that once.
“Cuck fans”–bit of a slip of the alt-right tongue there?
Truthfully, however, this is still relatively small potatoes in the greater scheme of things and it alone is not going to convince the Senate Republicans to march up Pennsylvania Avenue and ask Trump to pack his bags.
Prosecutors are recommending substantial jail time for Cohen. He was only acting at the direction of Trump. Therefore Trump’s illegality is even more heinous, and should (in a just world) result in even more substantial penalties. This sounds pretty damned serious to me, but, hey, I’m not a Republican senator.
Keep in mind that the “prosecutors” in this case are from the NY AG not Mueller or Dept. of Justice. And Trump has no ability to pardon Cohen for state-level crimes.
>> that the “prosecutors” in this case are from the NY AG
no that’s wrong. it is DOJ. office of the U.S. Atty for “the southern district of NY”.
. . . but still feds, not state.