Have any of these bastards condemned the Left-Wing nuts that have attacked conservatives?
MILWAUKEE/MOSINEE, Wis. (Reuters) – The undercurrent of rage that has been driving U.S. politics for the past few years surfaced on Wednesday in a series of suspected bombs sent to prominent U.S. Democrats and the news outlet CNN less than two weeks before congressional elections.
None of the devices went off and no injuries were reported, but a number of top Democrats were quick to label the threats a symptom of a coarsening brand of political rhetoric promoted by President Donald Trump, who also condemned the acts.
Police intercepted six suspected bombs sent to targets including Trump’s 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and prominent political donor George Soros. Law enforcement agencies were investigating.
During his presidential campaign, Trump regularly urged his supporters to chant “Lock her up,” a threat to jail Clinton, and supported conspiracy theories that Soros plays an underhanded role in influencing U.S. politics. Trump has also disparaged the mainstream media and criticized CNN as “fake news.”
At a political rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday night, Trump sought to project a message of unity, pledging to find those responsible for the suspected bombs and calling on Americans to come together.
“You see how nice I’m behaving tonight? Have you ever seen this?” he asked the crowd in Mosinee, Wisconsin. “We’re all behaving very well and hopefully we can keep it that way.”
Democrats were having none of it, saying the Republican president had little credibility to act as a unifying figure.
“President Trump’s words ring hollow until he reverses his statements that condone acts of violence,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement earlier in the day.
“For years now, Donald Trump has been calling for the jailing of his critics and has lauded violence against journalists,” said U.S. Representative Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat. “The danger of right-wing extremism cannot be ignored and more attention must be paid to it before even worse violence occurs.”
Politicians from both major parties have made condemning the harsh tone of politics part of their everyday stump speeches.
Republicans have criticized Democrats and liberal activists as a “mob,” decrying protesters crowding the U.S. Capitol to oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and confronting and chastising Republican lawmakers in restaurants and other settings. Scenes of small-scale violence also marked Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found rising anger would be a factor driving voters on the Nov. 6 elections when Democrats are seeking to regain control of at least one of the two chambers of Congress.
HEATED TONE
Trump sometimes invokes images of violence in remarks to his supporters. Last week, he reiterated his support for a Montana congressman who body-slammed a reporter in 2017. In August, Trump warned that if Democrats gained control of Congress, they would “quickly and violently” overturn his agenda.
Last year, he said there were bad people on both sides of a clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, between white supremacist groups and counter-protesters.
Some of the people who received suspicious packages, including Obama, Clinton and former Attorney General Eric Holder, have been targeted by online groups such as QAnon that push vast conspiracy theories saying Democrats are behind international crime rings.
Posts on online message boards dismissed the cluster of suspected bombs as a “false flag,” an allegation that a widely covered news event was a politically motivated hoax.
Paul Achter, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Richmond, said Trump’s frequently violent tone increased the likelihood of violent actions.
“Verbal abuse has consequences,” Achter said. “Just because Trump did not send a bomb or beat up a reporter or shoot up a newsroom doesn’t excuse this kind of speech.”
But Republican U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, who was wounded last year by a gunman who opened fire on Republican lawmakers during a baseball practice, said it was a mistake for Democrats to criticize Trump for the suspected bombs.
Two more suspicious packages found – FBI
“I think it was important that the President did come out with a statement the way he did – strongly,” Scalise said in a statement. “I heard silence a lot of times, when Republicans were under attack, from Democrat leaders. We all should be calling this out, whether a Republican or Democrat is under attack.”
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s husband was accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife, and his company once victim-blamed a woman who sued for sexual misconduct, Fox News has learned.
A graphic protection order once filed by Joseph Shepard’s ex-wife even alleged he hit her, tripped her and “peed on” her.
Shepard, who married McCaskill in 2002, has come under increasing scrutiny amid media reports detailing his financial decisions and wealth-building while his wife was in office. He reportedly has received more than $131 million in federal subsidies since 2007, the year McCaskill became a U.S. senator, and also invested $1 million in a hedge fund in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven his wife wants to crack down on.
His Democratic senator wife is currently facing a challenge from Republican state Attorney General Josh Hawley in one of the tightest races in the upcoming midterms. Multiple polls indicate the candidates are virtually tied.
The allegations against Shepard and the sexual harassment lawsuit against his company date back years, but nevertheless are a startling backdrop to the senator’s message regarding sexual harassment.
In a 2015 letter about sexual harassment, McCaskill wrote that “Victim-blaming in the context of sexual violence is as old as the crime itself” and that some “law enforcement officials sometimes unwilling to pursue justice because of the victim’s behavior prior to the crime.”
“’She was asking for it,’ is a sentence I have longed to see stripped from our cultural vocabulary,” she added. McCaskill also said multiple times that she believes women and their allegations of sexual misconduct.
In 1993, Shepard’s then-13-year-old daughter called the police to report that her mother, Suzanne Shepard, was a victim of a late-night assault, according to a police report obtained by Fox News. Shepard was listed as the only involved person. No charges were filed after the incident.
Five years later, in 1998, police were called again to the Shepard house. The police reported the wife claiming Shepard came to retrieve a carpet from the house and got involved in a dispute over marital problems. He then “proceeded to grab her right arm and push her,” the incident report read.
A 1998 police report. (Fox News)
The incident prompted the wife to file an adult abuse petition for order of protection against Shepard, where she provided additional details on what happened that night.
“Police called by friend in my home. Joseph entered my home. I told him to leave. He came up to me looking angry,” she wrote. “I put my hands up to protect my breasts as they are sore (cancer). He has hit me before in the breast. He grabbed my wrist and arm and pushed me up against the wall & I hit my head & back & he bruised my arms by pinching me.”
“I put my hands up to protect my breasts as they are sore (cancer). He has hit me before in the breast. He grabbed my wrist and arm and pushed me up against the wall & I hit my head & back & he bruised my arms by pinching me.”
— Suzanne Shepard
Shepard told the police officers at the time that his wife got physical first. “He said while he was attempting to load the [carpet] Mrs. Shepard began pushing him trying to get him out of the house,” police report states.
Fox News could not reach Suzanne Shepard, while the McCaskill campaign did not respond to multiple requests for a comment or an interview. Joseph Shepard also did not return requests for comment.
The protection order she filed against Shepard also recalled other previous incidents of alleged abuse.
“I am afraid of respondent and there is an immediate and present danger of abuse or stalking of me,” she claimed in the report. “He has tripped me, hit me before (police were called by my daughter), punched my cancer breast, peed on me, pushed me down and slapped me.”
“He now threatens that everything I have is his and I will end up in his low income housing and he wants to take my things,” she added.
“I am afraid of respondent and there is an immediate and present danger of abuse or stalking of me,” she claimed in the report. “He has tripped me, hit me before (police were called by my daughter), punched my cancer breast, peed on me, pushed me down and slapped me.”
— Suzanne Shepard
In later years, accusations of misconduct were also leveled against his businesses. Sugar Creek Realty – a company founded and owned by Shepard – was sued in 2009 in federal court for sexual harassment, prompting a campaign by the firm’s lawyers against the accuser.
Kristin Glemser accused the company and her female boss there of sexual misconduct, including allegedly asking her put on already-worn underwear, following her into a restroom, unbuttoning her pants without her consent, taking pictures of her in underwear without her consent and forcing her to watch her female boss simulate a sex act with another woman.
She said in a complaint obtained by Fox News that she “suffered mental anguish, inconvenience, embarrassment, the loss of the enjoyment of life and loss of employment” as a result of the incidents. In a deposition in court, the woman reiterated the claims she made in the complaint. Fox News couldn’t contact Glemser.
She also said Shepard’s company turned a blind eye to the rampant alleged harassment. Glemser said she “verbally” reported the incidents, but the employee responsible for dealing with such incidents “chose to do nothing about it” and tried to convince her to “go back to work” instead.
Sugar Creek initially defended against the allegations of sexual harassment, saying they weren’t aware of the accusations and the woman didn’t go through the reporting process as according to the company rules.
But in a February 2011 motion for summary judgment, Sugar Creek’s lawyers argued that her sexual misconduct claims weren’t “sufficiently severe or pervasive,” she was a “willing participant” in the “modeling” of the underwear, and she didn’t follow the company policy.
The lawyers also went on to diminish Glemser’s credibility by pointing out to her previous career as a model, asking her whether some of her modeling “pictures show you in considerably less clothing” than during the incidents she spoke about.
The company also filed a motion to make the woman’s modeling pictures part of the evidence in the case of sexual harassment in the workplace because her previous career indicated to her colleague that she “had no reason” to not be “willing to participate in modeling the [underwear].”
The accuser ultimately lost the case for employer liability after the court ruled that her claims failed because she “never returned to work.”
Former FBI General Counsel James Baker shared “explosive” information with Congress last week, according to Republicans.
Sources tell The Daily Caller News Foundation that Baker discussed his interactions with Mother Jones reporter David Corn as well as former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
Baker said McCabe told him that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed wearing a wire in meetings with President Donald Trump.
Former FBI General Counsel James Baker told Congress in “explosive” testimony about his interactions with a Mother Jones reporter just after the 2016 election as well as a conversation he had last year with then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe regarding Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Baker recently told lawmakers that David Corn, a reporter at the liberal Mother Jones, provided him a copy of the Steele dossier a day after President Donald Trump’s election win, sources familiar with Baker’s testimony told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Baker, who resigned from office in May, also told lawmakers that McCabe and his general counsel, Lisa Page, told him in May 2017 that Rosenstein made remarks about wearing a wire during meetings with Trump. Baker’s testimony seems to bolster a Sept. 21 report from The New York Times that cited memos McCabe wrote just after a meeting with Rosenstein in May 2017, shortly after James Comey was fired as FBI director. (RELATED: New York Times Reports That Rod Rosenstein Discussed Wearing A Wire In Conversations With Trump)
The Justice Department has disputed the story, saying that Rosenstein was making a joke in response to a request from McCabe to investigate Trump over his firing of Comey. The report touched off intense speculation about Rosenstein’s job status. He reportedly offered to resign following the report, but the White House rejected the proposal.
Baker told Congress that McCabe and Page took Rosenstein’s remarks seriously. Sources familiar with his testimony said Baker testified that he was not certain whether Rosenstein’s remarks, if said in earnest, were unethical or illegal.
The revelation comes as Rosenstein is scheduled to testify Wednesday before a group of the same lawmakers who interviewed Baker. Members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight & Government Reform committees have created a task force aimed at investigating the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe as well as the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Republicans on the task force have been heavily critical of Rosenstein amid a battle over documents related to the Russia probe. But some GOP lawmakers held their fire on Rosenstein following The Times report, noting that McCabe had a vested interest in undermining Rosenstein and Trump.
Trump said he has no plans to fire Rosenstein after the two met on Air Force One Monday.
The Justice Department declined to comment on Baker’s testimony regarding Rosenstein. Baker, who is now visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, did not respond to a request for comment.
GOP Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of both congressional committees, previously called Baker’s Oct. 3 testimony “explosive.”
A few details of Baker’s testimony were previously revealed, including that the former FBI lawyer met weeks before the 2016 election with Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the firm that commissioned the Steele dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Baker told lawmakers that the documents from Sussmann were related to the Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails. He did not testify that Sussmann provided him a copy of the Steele dossier. Instead, Baker received the document from Corn, the Mother Jones reporter.
Corn was one of a handful of reporters to meet prior to the election with dossier author Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer. On Oct. 31, 2016, the journalist reported some of Steele’s allegations that members of the Trump campaign were in secret contact with Russian operatives.
In December, Politico reported that congressional Republicans were looking into contacts between Corn and Baker prior to the election. Corn said Baker was not a source for his article.
The Hill reported on July 10 that FBI officials referred to Corn in an email on Jan. 10, 2017, just after BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier.
“Our internal system is blocking the site,” FBI official Peter Strzok wrote in an email to other top bureau officials. “I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what McCain had. (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)”
Simpson is Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele to investigate Trump. McCain is late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who provided Comey with a copy of the dossier on Dec. 9, 2016.
Corn did not respond to a request for comment from TheDCNF. He told The Hill in July that he provided a copy of the dossier to the FBI to find out whether the bureau had verified the document.
“I tried the FBI again after the election,” Corn told The Hill’s John Solomon. “On my own accord, I shared a copy of the dossier with the FBI in order to see if the bureau would authenticate the documents and now comment on them. Once again, it would not.”
Corn also denied being a source for the FBI.
“To characterize me as a source of the document is inaccurate. I was merely doing what a journalist does: trying to get more information on a story I was pursuing,” he said.
EXCLUSIVE: RELEASED TEXT MESSAGES AND EMAILS SHOW MUELLER TEAM’S COZY RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESS
Released messages document how Mueller’s spokesman took dozens of meetings with reporters over three months in 2017.
Reporters from nearly every major media outlet have been jockeying for influence and favoritism within the special counsel’s office.
One awkward exchange illustrates a reporter from CNN trashing an article written by White House correspondent Jim Acosta.
Hundreds of pages of emails and text messages released from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) special counsel’s office through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show an ongoing relationship between Robert Mueller’s team and the press, according to an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Please don’t forget that the corrupt Peter Strzok was on his team also.
The documents, released in September, span months of communication and include messages from reporters ranging from a variety of outlets, including TheDCNF, The Washington Post and BuzzFeed.
While the vast majority of correspondences between Mueller’s spokesman Peter Carr and a variety of journalists ends with a “no comment,” the messages expose Mueller’s team was willing to meet with a number of reporters in private meetings and over the phone.
Coordinating such meetings cuts against the narrative that the special counsel has been hesitant to give information to the press, instead opting to give information only through public announcements and statements.
No matter if snopes lies about these SOB’s, they are friends and criminals in bed together. (Click The Picture)
The New York Times ran a story in August poking fun at the secrecy of the special counsel, with one reporter writing that Carr’s “‘no comment’ replies have become a running dark joke among the Washington press corps.”
But on July 21st, 2017, Adam Goldman from TheNYT sent an email to Carr about arranging a “touch base” meeting, according to documents provided by the DOJ.
That meeting was later rescheduled, but it is just one in a pattern of meetings and private calls from reporters jockeying for opportunities to solicit information from an investigation that has been labeled as “leak proof” from the press.
Ironically, Vox was one of those exact outlets that proclaimed Mueller’s team as immune to leaks — despite one of its reporters communicating extensively with Carr via text.
During one interaction, Alex Ward asks Carr off the record if the investigation would continue should President Donald Trump fire Mueller.
“As guidance only, the [Deputy Attorney General] testified last week that he, not the President, would be the one to make the decision. 28 CFR 600 outlines under what circumstances a Special Counsel can be removed. If it came to that, a replacement would likely be found,” Carr answers.
A day later, Carr aids Ward in describing the room in which the investigation takes place. Despite Carr’s assistance, he is never mentioned in Ward’s piece published over a month later.
From late July until the end of September 2017, Carr held at least dozens of meetings with various reporters. Those meetings have rarely been discussed with the public, by both the government or the press, until the release of these documents.
TheDCNF could not find any evidence of impropriety by Mueller’s office, nor any evidence that Carr favored specific outlets.
Regardless, the messages document hours of conversations and meetings between a spokesman involved in a politicized investigation and reporters eager to cover for him in hopes of further access.
Other messages released by the DOJ illustrate more awkward interactions, showing how some reporters will even undermine colleagues in order to build trust in their relationship with the special counsel’s office.
CNN’s Evan Perez, who had extensive conversations with Carr from at least May through August 2017, expressed frustration at a story co-authored by the network’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta.
“I had nothing to do with it. Didn’t see it until after it was published. I would not have published that. But I’m also in a poor position to stop things,” Perez said of Acosta’s reporting.
Perez then communicates concern that the story could damage the validity of the special counsel’s investigation because of the attorney general’s politics.
“By the way, this story and the pick up its [sic] getting makes it so the public will think Mueller is in bed with (one of) the most partisan left-leaning AG in the nation. I’m sure he has good people working there but the leadership has a pretty partisan agenda,” Perez says to Carr.
“Maybe that’s what the Special Counsel wants,” he adds.
A month later, Perez ran a follow-up story on the Mueller investigation, prompting Carr to offer a phone call in case he needed any additional information or clarifications.
They need to be regulated and maybe investigated for trying influence the Election.
A video recorded by Google shortly after the 2016 presidential election reveals an atmosphere of panic and dismay amongst the tech giant’s leadership, coupled with a determination to thwart both the Trump agenda and the broader populist movement emerging around the globe.
The video is a full recording of Google’s first all-hands meeting following the 2016 election (these weekly meetings are known inside the company as “TGIF” or “Thank God It’s Friday” meetings). Sent to Breitbart News by an anonymous source, it features co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, VPs Kent Walker and Eileen Naughton, CFO Ruth Porat, and CEO Sundar Pichai. It can be watched in full above. It can and should be watched in full above in order to get the full context of the meeting and the statements made.
It was reported earlier this week that Google tried to boost turnout among the Latino population to help Hillary Clinton, only to be dismayed as the usually solid Democratic voting bloc switched to the GOP in record numbers. This video shows a similar level of dismay among Google’s most high-profile figures.
These individuals, who preside over a company with unrivaled influence over the flow of information, can be seen disparaging the motivations of Trump voters and plotting ways to use their vast resources to thwart the Trump agenda.
Co-founder Sergey Brin can be heard comparing Trump supporters to fascists and extremists. Brin argues that like other extremists, Trump voters were motivated by “boredom,” which he says in the past led to fascism and communism.
The Google co-founder then asks his company to consider what it can do to ensure a “better quality of governance and decision-making.”
VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker argues that supporters of populist causes like the Trump campaign are motivated by “fear, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.”
Later, Walker says that Google should fight to ensure the populist movement – not just in the U.S. but around the world – is merely a “blip” and a “hiccup” in a historical arc that “bends toward progress.”
CEO Sundar Pichai states that the company will develop machine learning and A.I. to combat what an employee described as “misinformation” shared by “low-information voters.”
Key moments from the video can be found at the following timestamps:
(00:00:00 – 00:01:12) Google co-founder Sergey Brin states that the weekly meeting is “probably not the most joyous we’ve had” and that “most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad.”
(00:00:24) Brin contrasts the disappointment of Trump’s election with his excitement at the legalization of cannabis in California, triggering laughs and applause from the audience of Google employees.
(00:01:12) Returning to seriousness, Brin says he is “deeply offen[ded]” by the election of Trump, and that the election “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.”
(00:09:10) Trying to explain the motivations of Trump supporters, Senior VP for Global Affairs, Kent Walker concludes: “fear, not just in the United States, but around the world is fueling concerns, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be there.”
(00:09:35) Walker goes on to describe the Trump phenomenon as a sign of “tribalism that’s self-destructive [in] the long-term.”
(00:09:55) Striking an optimistic tone, Walker assures Google employees that despite the election, “history is on our side” and that the “moral arc of history bends towards progress.”
(00:10:45) Walker approvingly quotes former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s comparison between “the world of the wall” with its “isolation and defensiveness” and the “world of the square, the piazza, the marketplace, where people come together into a community and enrich each other’s lives.”
(00:13:10) CFO Ruth Porat appears to break down in tears when discussing the election result.
(00:15:20) Porat promises that Google will “use the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values.”
(00:16:50) Stating “we all need a hug,” she then instructs the audience of Google employees to hug the person closest to them.
(00:20:24) Eileen Naughton, VP of People Operations, promises that Google’s policy team in DC is “all over” the immigration issue and that the company will “keep a close watch on it.”
(00:21:26) Naughton jokes about Google employees asking, ‘Can I move to Canada?’ after the election. She goes on to seriously discuss the options available to Google employees who wish to leave the country.
(00:23:12) Naughton does acknowledge “diversity of opinion and political persuasion” and notes that she has heard from conservative Google employees who say they “haven’t felt entirely comfortable revealing who [they] are.” and urged “tolerance.” (Several months later, the company would fire James Damore allegedly for disagreeing with progressive narratives.)
(00:27:00) Responding to a question about “filter bubbles,” Sundar Pichai promises to work towards “correcting” Google’s role in them
(00:27:30) Sergey Brin praises an audience member’s suggestion of increasing matched Google employee donations to progressive groups.
(00:34:40) Brin compares Trump voters to “extremists,” arguing for a correlation between the economic background of Trump supporters and the kinds of voters who back extremist movements. Brin says that “voting is not a rational act” and that not all of Trump’s support can be attributed to “income disparity.” He suggests that Trump voters might have been motivated by boredom rather than legitimate concerns.
(00:49:10) An employee asks if Google is willing to “invest in grassroots, hyper-local efforts to bring tools and services and understanding of Google products and knowledge” so that people can “make informed decisions that are best for themselves.” Pichai’s response: Google will ensure its “educational products” reach “segments of the population [they] are not [currently] fully reaching.”
(00:54:33) An employee asks what Google is going to do about “misinformation” and “fake news” shared by “low-information voters.” Pichai responds by stating that “investments in machine learning and AI” are a “big opportunity” to fix the problem.
(00:56:12) Responding to an audience member, Walker says Google must ensure the rise of populism doesn’t turn into “a world war or something catastrophic … and instead is a blip, a hiccup.”
(00:58:22) Brin compares Trump voters to supporters of fascism and communism, linking the former movement to “boredom,” which Brin previously linked to Trump voters. “It sort of sneaks up sometimes, really bad things” says Brin.
(01:01:15) A Google employee states: “speaking to white men, there’s an opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege” and urges employees to “go through the bias-busting training, read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression in our country.” He urges employees to “discuss the issues you are passionate about during Thanksgiving dinner and don’t back down and laugh it off when you hear the voice of oppression speak through metaphors.” Every executive on stage – the CEO, CFO, two VPs and the two Co-founders – applaud the employee.
(01:01:57) An audience member asks if the executives see “anything positive from this election result.” The audience of Google employees, and the executives on stage, burst into laughter. “Boy, that’s a really tough one right now” says Brin.
Update — After Breitbart News published this article, a Google spokesperson replied to a request for comment with the following statement:
“At a regularly scheduled all hands meeting, some Google employees and executives expressed their own personal views in the aftermath of a long and divisive election season. For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely express their opinions at these meetings. Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint.”
Here we go, from Russia with love, to campaign finance with love.
Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the Paul Manafort bin reserved by the special counsel for squeezing until the juice comes out. We are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.
The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who does not try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump to corporations for millions of dollars while acting as his lawyer, and did not pay taxes on millions.
The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures. That is true for both candidates we like and candidates we do not. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs. They would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion.
There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual agreement. Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign violation for having “coordinated” the American Media payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment. He is pleading guilty over a corporate contribution he did not make. Think about this for a minute. Suppose ABC paid Stormy Daniels for her story in coordination with Michael Avenatti or maybe even the law firm of the Democratic National Committee on the eve of the election.
By this reasoning, if the purpose of this money paid, just before the election, would be to hurt Trump and help Clinton win, this payment would be a corporate political contribution. If using it not to get Trump would be a corporate contribution, then using it to get Trump also has to be a corporate contribution. That is why neither are corporate contributions and this is a bogus approach to federal election law. Note that none of the donors in the 2012 John Edwards case faced any legal issues and the Federal Election Commission ruled their payments were not campaign contributions that had to be reported, both facts that prosecutors tried to suppress at trial.
Now, when it comes to Stormy Daniels, Cohen made a payment a few days before the election that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani says was reimbursed. First, given that this payment was in October, it would never have been reported before the election campaign and so, for all intents and purposes, was immaterial as it relates to any effect on the campaign. What is clear in this plea deal is that, in exchange for overall leniency on his massive tax evasion, Cohen is pleading guilty to these other charges as an attempt to give prosecutors what they want, which is a Trump connection.
The usual procedures here would be for the Federal Election Commission to investigate complaints and sort through these murky laws to determine if these kinds of payments are personal in nature or more properly classified as campaign expenditures. On the Stormy Daniels payment that was made and reimbursed by Trump, it is again a question of whether that was made for personal reasons, especially since they have been trying since 2011 to obtain agreement. Just because it would be helpful to the campaign does not convert it to a campaign expenditure. Think of a candidate with bad teeth who had dental work done to look better for the campaign. His campaign still could not pay for it because it is a personal expenditure.
Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form, despite crystal clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, yet no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. The reason? It does not “get” Trump.
So, Trump spends $130,000 to keep the lid on a personal story and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney-client privilege to the wind. Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs. Remember that the feds tried a similar strategy against Democratic candidate Edwards six years ago and it failed. As Gregory Craig, a lawyer who worked both for President Clinton and Edwards, said, “The government theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution.” Tried it there anyway and it failed.
Let us also not forget that President Clinton was entrapped into lying about his affairs and, although impeached, was acquitted by the Senate. The lesson was clear: We are not going to remove presidents for lying about who they had affairs with, nor even convict politicians on campaign finance violations for these personal payments.
With Cohen pleading guilty, there will be no test of soundness of the prosecution theories here, and it is yet another example of the double standards of justice of one investigation that gave Clinton aides and principals every benefit of the doubt and another investigation that targeted Trump people until they found unrelated crimes to use as leverage. Prosecutors thought nothing of using the Logan Act against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, but they are using obscure and unsettled elements of campaign finance law against Trump lawyer Cohen to manufacture crimes in what is a naked attempt to take Trump down and defeat democracy.
Trump should do a better job of picking aides who pay their taxes, but he is not responsible for their financial problems and crimes. These investigations, essentially based on an opposition dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down.
That is why so many of his aides, lawyers, and actions in the campaign and in the White House have undergone hour by hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia collusion theory as the fake pretext it was. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the Federal Election Commission. Squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does nothing to change those facts.
