Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

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[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump could be forgiven if he feels like the walls are closing in on him.

In just the past few days, Robert Mueller’s office apparently has been gearing up for action against Trump associates Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has managed—against all odds—to get himself in even deeper trouble. There have been additional revelations about Trump’s central role in hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. And on Thursday came the announcement that Cohen had reached an additional plea deal, this time not with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and not about campaign finance matters but with Mueller and about something very collusion-y involving Russia and the Trump Organization.

No, this isn’t the collusion plea. The plea is not about hacked emails or the social-media conspiracy of the Internet Research Agency. As of this writing, Trump has not tweeted “NO COLLUSION!” since the charges were announced.

But the tweet, when it inevitably comes, will ring a bit hollow, because the new charges are not not a collusion plea either. In effect, Cohen admitted in court on Thursday that even as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic emails and getting ready to dump emails through Wikileaks, even as Trump was publicly praising Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, even as the Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. took place in the summer of 2016, the Trump Organization—with Trump and his family very much in the know—was negotiating to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The Trump Organization was negotiating—or, at least, trying to negotiate—this deal with the Kremlin itself. And Cohen has admitted that he lied to Congress about this history to protect Trump politically.

Before we dive into the weeds, let’s pause a moment over this. Because in important respects, the legalities—or illegalities—at issue here are secondary points. The primary point is that this is all utterly unacceptable. That a large swath of the public, and the legislative branch, has chosen to accept it does not make it more reasonable that a man seeking to be president of the United States would at the same time publicly cozy up to a foreign dictator and negotiate with his regime over a potential business opportunity—and then cover it all up. The story is likely to get worse. As this article was about to go to publication, Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold broke in BuzzFeed News that the Trump Organization planned to gift Vladimir Putin a penthouse suite at Trump Tower Moscow: ...

The details of Cohen’s plea, to which we now turn, do not soften the reality at all.

Here is a summary of the material released in connection with the agreement, as well as some analysis of it all.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Robert Mueller’s prosecutors dropped a legal bombshell on Monday when they revealed Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman-turned-cooperating-witness, had violated his plea agreement by lying to the special counsel’s team. In my 30 years as a federal prosecutor, I’ve experienced this very circumstance. But in the aftermath of that revelation, we also learned that while Manafort was “cooperating” with Mueller, one of his lawyers was reporting back to President Donald Trump’s legal team. In a very real sense, it now appears that Manafort and/or a member of his team served as a mole inside the Mueller investigation. This apparent two-timing raises many questions, some of them quite novel.

...

Notwithstanding the fact that his cooperation has been breached, Manafort now heads back to court for sentencing. This is interesting for two reasons. First, it signals that Mueller is content to be done with Manafort rather than withdraw from the agreement due to Manafort’s breach and put his DC case back on the docket for trial. We can thereby infer that Mueller has squeezed all the truth he can out of Manafort and is ready to bring an end to their relationship. Second, it reinforces the fact that Manafort’s defense team will not try to fight Mueller’s contention that Manafort lied, suggesting they are ready to cut their losses and take their lumps at sentencing.

The sentencing likely will not go well for Manafort. His breach of the cooperation agreement almost certainly means he will serve a far lengthier prison term, perhaps upwards of two decades. Manafort could also face additional criminal charges if prosecutors indict him for lying. However, given Manafort’s age and the prison term he already faces as a result of his conviction in his Virginia case and guilty plea in his DC case, additional charges make little practical sense.

 

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Why yes there is sir. A Failure of an MD on this thread.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-f...98?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/dprRncceT5

 

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