Day 687: DOJ: Trump committed felonies
Hoo boy.
According to court filings revealed Friday, the Department of Justice has concluded that Donald Trump committed at least two felonies.
Federal prosecutors filed a sentencing memorandum for Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, as well as his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. (The latter of which was nearly entirely redacted.) The filings make clear that “Individual-1” is Trump by noting that Cohen worked for “Individual-1” and that person later became president.
The sentencing memo reads, in part: “Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.”
Those payments relate to paying off women who alleged affairs with Trump. Based on the timing and nature of those payments, they were to support Trump’s campaign and were illegal felonies under campaign finance laws.
The memo was drafted by federal attorneys with the Southern District of New York and not members of Robert Mueller’s investigation following Cohen’s guilty pleas. The attorneys are members of the DOJ and are alleging a criminal conspiracy by Cohen and Trump to violate campaign finance laws.
Cohen is facing a multi-year prison term related to the campaign finance crimes. Mueller’s team filed their own memo and noted that Cohen’s cooperation with their investigation has led them to believe that any prison sentence stemming from crimes they uncover can be served concurrently with the SDNY charges.
Exactly how helpful has he been?
Cohen has provided Mueller’s team with “useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with Company executives during them.”
The filing also notes that Cohen was told that Trump could expect “political synergy” from the Russian government for Trump, if he so desired, in a promise delivered in 2015.
Campaign finance felonies, potential Russia-related felonies and more: Cohen is singing like a canary and all put Trump in legal peril.
Trump prepared for the disastrous news by rage tweeting about Mueller most of the day — who, again, didn’t draft the underlying SDNY memos — and calling his former secretary of state “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.”
After the memos were made public, it was readily apparent that Trump is in serious legal jeopardy. While he has been credibly accused as an unindicted co-conspirator to campaign-related felonies by the DOJ, those are just the tip of the huge legal iceberg on the horizon based on what Mueller’s team has been revealing for weeks.
While Trump laughably claimed he has been exonerated …
… the words on the sentencing memos don’t lie.
687 days in, 775 to go
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