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.
BuzzFeed News, which published the infamous dossier, is refusing to comment on recent comments from Lanny Davis, the Clinton-connected lawyer representing Michael Cohen
Davis is emphatically stating that the dossier’s allegations about Cohen are “100 percent” false. Davis claims that Cohen “never, never, ever” went to Prague, as the dossier alleges
The dossier is Exhibit A in Trump critics’ collusion conspiracy theory
For nearly 20 months, the allegations made in the infamous Steele dossier have hung like a cloud over the Trump administration and several of his former advisers.
The salacious 35-page document has become Exhibit A in President Donald Trump critics’ conspiracy theory that the campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Numerous news outlets, pundits and lawmakers have also pushed the theory.
But the dossier arguably suffered its heaviest blow on Wednesday after Clinton-connected lawyer Lanny Davis emphatically denied one of the document’s most intriguing allegations.
Davis said the dossier’s claims that his client, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, traveled to Prague in August 2016 as part of a conspiracy with the Kremlin are “100 percent” false.
Davis’ comments received little attention from the both the mainstream press and the entities that have pushed the dossier.
“We have no comment on Mr. Davis’s statements,” said Matt Mittenhal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier on behalf of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, has also not weighed in. Joshua Levy, a lawyer for the firm, did not respond to a request for a response to Davis’ comments.
The DNC did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Marc Elias, the attorney who hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.
McClatchy News, which in April reported that special counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Cohen did travel to Prague, says that it is sticking by its report. The article, written by reporters Greg Gordon and Peter Stone, breathed new life into the dossier’s claims about Cohen, but it has never been corroborated.
“We stand by our reporting,” said Jeanne Segal, a spokeswoman for McClatchy.
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Denials about the dossier’s claims are as old as the salacious document itself.
Then President-elect Trump called the dossier “crap” during a press conference a day after BuzzFeed published the report. Cohen vehemently denied the allegations, as did former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Page is alleged in the dossier of being the Trump campaign’s conduit to the Kremlin. Though the allegations remain unverified, the FBI relied heavily on the dossier to obtain four surveillance warrants against Page.
Davis’ statements would seem to add substantial weight to Cohen’s denials, largely because he is far from a Trump supporter.
Davis is close friends with former President Bill and Hillary Clinton. He held an unofficial role as a surrogate for the Clinton campaign, which partnered with the DNC to pay Fusion GPS $1 million for the dossier.
Davis has also made it his mission over the past couple of months to discredit Trump regarding hush money payments to women who claimed to have had affairs with the former real estate mogul. The 74-year-old PR guru gave CNN an audio clip earlier this month of Cohen speaking with Trump about payments to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate who claimed to have an affair with Trump in 2006.
Cohen pleaded guilty to a series of charges on Tuesday, including some that are related to the payoff to McDougal and Stormy Daniels. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and bank fraud.
***
Cohen last publicly disputed the dossier on June 28, when he wrote on Twitter that the “dossier misreports 15 allegations about me.”
“My entire statement must be quoted – I had nothing to do with Russian collusion or meddling!” he said.
It had been unclear if Cohen planned to maintain those denials in the wake of guilty plea earlier this week. But Davis answered the question in a series of interviews on Wednesday.
“Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life,” Davis said Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg.
“Never, never in Prague. Did I make that? Never, never, ever. Ever,” Davis told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.
“And the reason, just to let your viewers know, what we’re talking about is that the dossier, so-called, mentions his name 14 times, one of which is a meeting with Russians in Prague. Fourteen times false,” he continued.
Davis was even more emphatic in an interview with BBC Newsnight.
“The answer is 100 percent ‘no.’ Never has he ever been in Prague. And the 13 other references to my client in the so-called dossier are false,” Davis said in the interview, pounding the table to underscore each specific denial.
BBC Newsnight
✔@BBCNewsnight
“I told you I’m an Anglophile and you asked me the question I wanted you to ask me” Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s lawyer speaks to Evan Davis.@LannyDavis | @EvanHD | @BBCTwo | #newsnight
BuzzFeed and other news outlets ignored Davis’ statements (CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major outlets have not picked up the story as of this writing), however, an attorney for another dossier target is weighing in.
“The one thing that we’ve always know for certain is that the allegations concerning Gubarev, Webzilla, and XBT are completely false, and to the extent that those allegations overlap with allegations concerning Mr. Cohen we knew those had to be false as well,” said Evan Fray-Witzer, a lawyer for Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian tech executive suing BuzzFeed over the dossier.
Cohen and Gubarev are both mentioned in the 17th and final dossier memo, dated Dec. 13, 2016. The memo alleges that Cohen traveled to Prague to pay hackers for cyber attacks against the Democratic National Committee.
The memo then claims that Gubarev’s companies infiltrated the DNC’s computer networks using viruses, bots and malware.
“The special counsel indicted the people involved in the hacking and those people aren’t our clients. We may never know precisely how Gubarev, Webzilla, and XBT ended up in the Dossier, but we do know that after more than a year of trying, Buzzfeed has no evidence to support the allegations that they published about them,” Fray-Witzer told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
President Barack Obama was caught on camera on Monday assuring outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he will have “more flexibility” to deal with contentious issues like missile defense after the U.S. presidential election.
Obama, during talks in Seoul, urged Moscow to give him “space” until after the November ballot, and Medvedev said he would relay the message to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The unusually frank exchange came as Obama and Medvedev huddled together on the eve of a global nuclear security summit in the South Korean capital, unaware their words were being picked up by microphones as reporters were led into the room.
U.S. plans for an anti-missile shield have bedeviled relations between Washington and Moscow despite Obama’s “reset” in ties between the former Cold War foes. Obama’s Republican opponents have accused him of being too open to concessions to Russia on the issue.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney seized on Obama’s comment, calling it “alarming and troubling.”
“This is no time for our president to be pulling his punches with the American people,” Romney said in a campaign speech in San Diego.
As he was leaning toward Medvedev in Seoul, Obama was overheard asking for time – “particularly with missile defense” – until he is in a better position politically to resolve such issues.
“I understand your message about space,” replied Medvedev, who will hand over the presidency to Putin in May.
“This is my last election … After my election I have more flexibility,” Obama said, expressing confidence that he would win a second term.
“I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” said Medvedev, Putin’s protégé and long considered number two in Moscow’s power structure.
The exchange, parts of it inaudible, was monitored by a White House pool of television journalists as well as Russian reporters listening live from their press center.
The United States and NATO have offered Russia a role in the project to create an anti-ballistic shield which includes participation by Romania, Poland, Turkey and Spain.
But Moscow says it fears the system could weaken Russia by gaining the capability to shoot down the nuclear missiles it relies on as a deterrent.
It wants a legally binding pledge from the United States that Russia’s nuclear forces would not be targeted by the system and joint control of how it is used.
The White House, initially caught off-guard by questions about the leaders’ exchange, later released a statement recommitting to implementing missile defense “which we’ve repeatedly said is not aimed at Russia” but also acknowledging election-year obstacles on the issue.
“Since 2012 is an election year in both countries, with an election and leadership transition in Russia and an election in the United States, it is clearly not a year in which we are going to achieve a breakthrough,” White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said.
“Therefore, President Obama and President Medvedev agreed that it was best to instruct our technical experts to do the work of better understanding our respective positions, providing space for continued discussions on missile defense cooperation going forward,” he said.
On Monday’s edition of CNN’s New Day, Chris Cuomo repeatedly accused the Russian state of waging “war” against America via “election hacking” in 2016. He offered his analysis while reporting from Helsinki, Finland, in anticipation of a meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Cuomo said “meddling” is an insufficiently severe word to describe “election hacking.”
“The big, ugly white elephant in the room will be the U.S. election hacking,” said Cuomo. “We’ve been calling it meddling, but I’m trying to stay away from the word because it’s just way too mild. This is an act of war.”
Cuomo further framed his narrative of “election hacking” as “the truth”: “How does [Donald Trump] raise the act of war of the hacking and different attacks during the U.S. election when Vladimir Putin knows damn well that President Trump doesn’t really believe the truth and doesn’t put a whole lot of stock in the event itself?”
Putin’s mere arrival in Helsinki amounted to a “win” for the Russian president, assessed Cuomo: “It’s a win for Putin the moment he landed safely on the ground because he’s been given legitimacy by the U.S. president. Literally the world is waiting on him to get here. But the easy win for Putin is this happening at all. He’s been given legitimacy on the world stage. End of story.”
“Animus should be directed towards the Russian president [by Trump],” added Cuomo.
New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota implicitly advised Trump to publicly denounce Putin towards unspecified ends: “President Trump refused to condemn Putin as a ruthless leader or a foe in this new interview with ITV. … Furthermore, you know, he hasn’t really called Putin a bad guy. In other words, he doesn’t necessarily think that Putin’s a bad guy. In fact, I mean, here’s where his mindset was this morning.”
CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour concurred with Cuomo’s assertions of “election hacking” and “war.” She said, “Yes, it is an act of violation of sovereignty of the United States and the other European countries that have been cyber hacked on their electoral matters.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins appraised Trump’s rejection of the “election hacking” narrative as amounting to “repeating exactly what the Kremlin wants to hear.”
At no point did any of CNN’s anchors, correspondents, analysts, or guests qualify “election hacking.”
CNN markets itself as a non-partisan and politically objective news media outlet, branding itself “The Most Trusted Name In News.”
President Trump on Saturday reacted to the indictment of 12 Russian military officers “for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 presidential election” by blaming former President Obama and the “deep state.”
“The stories you heard about the 12 Russians yesterday took place during the Obama Administration, not the Trump Administration,” he tweeted from Scotland. “Why didn’t they do something about it, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September, before the Election?”
He also expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the U.S. and ordered two Russian compounds to be closed.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is now leading the investigation into Russian interference in the election, as well as possible collusion within the Trump campaign. His probe led to the 12 indictments announced on Friday by the Justice Department. They are charged with hacking Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials and dispersing the stolen documents online.
The Trump administration has emphasized that the indictments do not indicate any level of collusion by a member of the Trump campaign. Trump has repeatedly said there was no collusion.
Trump went on to question “Where is the DNC Server, and why didn’t the FBI take possession of it?”
He proposed that the server could have been kept hidden by the “Deep State.”
The deep state is a conspiracy theory that claims high-level officials run a shadow government working against Trump.
Trump has suggested in the past a conspiracy around the computer servers at the DNC that Russians hacked during the election.
The FBI reportedly has not directly assessed the hacked server during the agency investigation, instead relying on information from a private security firm.
Rod Rosenstein looks like a creepy child molester. But were is the Trump and Russian collusion?
Twelve Russian military intelligence officers hacked into the Clinton presidential campaign and Democratic Party, releasing tens of thousands of stolen and politically damaging communications, in a sweeping conspiracy by the Kremlin to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, according to a grand jury indictment announced days before President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The indictment stands as special counsel Robert Mueller’s first allegation implicating the Russian government directly in criminal behavior meant to sway the presidential election.
U.S. intelligence agencies have said the meddling was aimed at helping the Trump campaign and harming the election bid of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The effort also included bogus Facebook ads and social media postings that prosecutors say were aimed at influencing public opinion and sowing discord on hot-button social issues.
The indictment lays out a broad, coordinated effort starting in March 2016 to break into key Democratic email accounts, such as those belonging to the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Among those targeted was John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman.
The Kremlin denied anew that it tried to sway the election. “The Russian state has never interfered and has no intention of interfering in the U.S. elections,” Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Friday.
But the indictment identifies the defendants as officers with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, also known as GRU. It accuses them of covertly monitoring the computers of dozens of Democratic officials and volunteers, implanting malicious computer code known as malware and using phishing emails to gain control of the accounts of people associated with the Clinton campaign.
By June 2016, the defendants began planning the release of tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents, the indictment alleges. The messages were released through fictitious personas like DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.
The charges come as Mueller continues to investigate potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to influence the presidential election. The indictment does not allege that Trump campaign associates were involved in the hacking efforts or that any American was knowingly in contact with Russian intelligence officers.
The indictment also does not allege that any vote tallies were altered by hacking.
Still, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the internet “allows foreign adversaries to attack Americans in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us.”
A White House statement offered no condemnation of the alleged Russian conspiracy. Instead it focused on the fact that no Trump campaign officials or Americans were implicated in the new indictment. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on Twitter that it was time to end the Mueller investigation since “no Americans are involved.”
But with Mueller still investigating, it’s not known whether further indictments are taking shape or will.
Before Friday, 20 people and three companies had been charged in the Mueller investigation. The 20 are four former Trump campaign and White House aides, three of whom have pleaded guilty to different crimes and agreed to cooperate, and 13 Russians accused of participating in a hidden but powerful social media campaign to sway U.S. public opinion in the 2016 election.
If the involvement of the GRU officers in the hacking effort is proved, it would shatter the Kremlin denials of the Russian state’s involvement in the U.S. elections.
The GRU, which answers to the Russian military’s General Staff, is part of the state machine and its involvement would indicate that the orders to interfere in the U.S. election came from the very top.
One attempt at interference noted in the indictment came hours after Trump, in a July 27, 2016, speech, suggested Russians look for emails that Clinton said she had deleted from her tenure as secretary of state.
“Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
That evening, the indictment says, the Russians attempted to break into email accounts used by Clinton’s personal office, along with 76 Clinton campaign email addresses.
Hours before the Justice Department announcement, Trump complained anew that the special counsel’s investigation is complicating his efforts to forge a better working relationship with Russia. Trump and Putin are scheduled to hold talks Monday in Finland, a meeting largely sought by Trump.
After the indictments were announced, top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer called on Trump to cancel his meeting with Putin until Russia takes steps to prove it won’t interfere in future elections. He said the indictments are “further proof of what everyone but the president seems to understand: President Putin is an adversary who interfered in our elections to help President Trump win.”
Trump complained about “stupidity” when asked about Mueller’s probe earlier Friday, at a news conference in Britain with Prime Minister Theresa May.
“We do have a — a political problem where — you know in the United States we have this stupidity going on,” he said. “Pure stupidity. But it makes it very hard to do something with Russia. Anything you do, it’s always going to be, ‘Oh, Russia, he loves Russia.'”
“I love the United States,” Trump continued. “But I love getting along with Russia and China and other countries.”
