MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to arrange hush-money payments with two women because then-candidate Trump “was very concerned about how this would affect the election” if their allegations of affairs became public, the president’s former personal attorney said in an exclusive interview with ABC News.
Cohen’s comments are his first since being sentenced earlier this week to three years in federal prison for financial crimes, lying to Congress and two campaign finance violations in connection with the deals with the women, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, who claim past affairs with Trump.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” Cohen told ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos. “I stood up before the world [Wednesday] and I accepted the responsibility for my actions.”
When asked if the president also knew it was wrong to make the payments, Cohen replied, “Of course,” adding that the purpose was to “help [Trump] and his campaign.”
Cohen said he is “angry at himself” for his role in the deals, but that he did it out of “blind loyalty” to Trump.
“I gave loyalty to someone who, truthfully, does not deserve loyalty,” he said.
Last edited:
“What is so significant about Butina is that she pulls the curtain back on Russia’s larger objectives,” says Max Bergmann of the Moscow Project. “Her influence efforts started before the Trump campaign existed and formed a distinct and separate line of effort. Her goal was to move the Republican Party away from its 70-year-plus history of being hawkish toward Russia. To do so, she built ties to one of the most powerful interest group on the right: the NRA.”
He continues, “So at the same time the Russians were backing Trump, they were also seeking to influence the NRA and the Republican Party with the stated goal of shifting U.S. policy.”
He concludes, “This demonstrates that Russia launched a multifaceted political assault in the U.S., and support for Trump was only the biggest part of the assault.”
It will be fascinating to learn the extent of the Russians' relationship with the NRA, as well as other right-wing groups. (“Butina and Torshin invited NRA leaders to Moscow in December 2015, a delegation that included David Keene, a former NRA president and past head of the powerful American Conservative Union. Documents reviewed previously by The Washington Post show the group met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.”)
So many Russians. So many people on the Trump campaign (14 at last count) in contact with Russians. The Moscow Project has counted up more than 90 separate contacts between Trump team members and those linked to the Russian government. No other campaign of either major party has ever, to our knowledge, had a single contact with a hostile foreign power.
It’s odd that Trump wasn’t getting courted for possible “synergy” with an ally of the United States but rather with Russia. It’s likewise curious that Russia was seeking to penetrate the American right, not the left. (I don’t think the Sierra Club or the ACLU had a problem with Russian spies.) From what country did foreigners come who contacted Trump Jr. with dirt on Hillary Clinton? And which country had a cutout, WikiLeaks, dump Clinton’s emails? Russia. Russia. It was never Italy or China, for example. Always Russia.
...
UPDATE: Former acting CIA director John McLaughlin explained the significance of the Butina plea. He told me, “The big picture takeaway is that Russia comes at the U.S. target with every option it can muster — full fledged spies operating under some kind of cover and seeking to recruit genuine secret agents; a corps of ‘Illegals’ like the ten expelled from the US in 20, kept in place for contingencies that develop; and someone like Butina who is best seen as ‘espionage lite,’ a person who hides in plain sight, makes no secret of her broad aim to improve Russia-US relations but conceals the role of official Russia in guiding and enabling much of her work.” He summed up, “Working in combination, these three techniques increase dramatically the possibility that Moscow will gain something - or someone — of intelligence value.”
Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was handed a task considered critical to the president’s operations. In addition to serving as a senior adviser in the White House, he would also be playing the role of the main conduit between Trump and his friend David Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher and chief executive of AMI, which prosecutors said on Wednesday admitted to making a $150,000 hush-money payment “in concert with” the Trump campaign.
During the early months of the Trump era, Kushner performed the task admirably, discussing with Pecker various issues over the phone, including everything from international relations to media gossip, according to four sources familiar with the situation. Pecker, for his part, bragged to people that he was speaking to the president’s son-in-law and, more generally, about the level of access he had to the upper echelons of the West Wing, two sources with knowledge of the relationship recounted.
The relationship underscored both the wide breadth of responsibilities that Kushner was given in the White House—a portfolio that saw him serve as a point person on some of the most critical government functions and as a chief protector of the Trump family image—as well as the degree to which Trump continued to value the relationships he’d built up with key media figures during his time in New York real estate and reality TV.
Pecker, after all, was no bit player. He has been a valuable asset within Trump’s orbit, at least until federal investigators came knocking. His ties to Trump began well before the president was elected into office. But before Kushner was his main conduit, that role was played by Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney and fixer.
During the heat of the 2016 election, Pecker’s AMI and Enquirer—with Cohen helping facilitate matters behind the scenes—endorsed Trump, ran a catch-and-kill operation to suppress damaging stories of Trump’s alleged affairs, and published numerous negative articles on Trump’s political enemies and adversaries in the Republican primary. Trump himself used to contribute to the Enquirer and the future president reportedly also used the tabloid to settle his pettier, more personal scores. In late 2016, actress Salma Hayek claimed on a conference call hosted by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Trump had tried to date her and when she rejected him, he planted a false story about her in the Enquirer.
For months, President Trump’s spokesmen, his lawyer and his lawyer’s lawyer denied that Trump knew about payments during his 2016 campaign to buy the silence of women who alleged sexual encounters with him. The president himself claimed the same.
But after mounting evidence and fresh courthouse revelations of wrongdoing this week exposed those denials as falsehoods, Trump is shifting his tune.
The president no longer disputes that he instructed his then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to make the payments to former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels.
Instead, Trump sought to evade that question Thursday by saying he never told Cohen to break the law — making a narrow assertion that was itself an admission that his and his team’s earlier denials were false.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law,” Trump wrote in Twitter statements that were at times hard to comprehend. “He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’ and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid.”
In these and other statements Thursday, Trump tried to place blame entirely on his lawyer for felonies that his advisers and allies are increasingly concerned could imperil the president. The statements come as Trump feels besieged by multiplying investigations in https://www.washingtonpost.com/election-results/new-york/?tid=a_inl_auto (New York) and Washington and uncertain about what may be around the corner, according to several of his associates.
The evolving strategy on the hush-money allegations is textbook Trump: Tell one version of events until it falls apart, then tell a new version, and so on — until the danger passes.
By George T. Conway III ,
Trevor Potter and
Neal Katyal
Last week, in their case against Michael Cohen, federal prosecutors in New York filed a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/07/takeaways-michael-cohen-sentencing-filings/ (sentencing brief concluding) that, in committing the felony campaign-finance violations to which he pleaded guilty, Cohen had “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” President Trump. And this week, prosecutors revealed that they had obtained an agreement from AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, in which https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/publisher-of-the-national-enquirer-admits-to-hush-money-payments-made-on-trumps-behalf/2018/12/12/ebf24b76-fe49-11e8-83c0-b06139e540e5_story.html (AMI admitted) that it, too, had made an illegal payment to influence the election. The AMI payment was the product of a meeting in which Trump was in the room with Cohen and AMI President David Pecker.
This all suggests Trump could become a target of a very serious criminal campaign finance investigation. In response, Trump has https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/10/trump-gops-dishonest-minimizin (offered up three defenses). His first was to repeatedly lie. For quite some time, he flatly denied knowledge about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. But now he seems to be acknowledging that he knew (since his personal company reimbursed Cohen for the payment, he ought to). Now Trump and his acolytes have turned to two other excuses: They point to an earlier case involving https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/26/a-john-edwards-comparison-that-isnt-all-bad-for-trump/ (former senator John Edwards) to argue that what Trump did wasn’t a crime; and they say, even if it was a crime, it wasn’t a biggie — there are lots of crimes, so what, who cares.
The former is a very weak legal argument, and the latter a dangerous one. Indeed, the campaign finance violations here are among the most important ever in the history of this nation — given the razor-thin win by Trump and the timing of the crimes, they very well may have swung a presidential election.
...
The whole idea of our criminal justice system is to enumerate those offenses that are so egregious that they demand serious jail time. Those felonies are the bread and butter of our criminal justice system. Of course, every criminal defendant seeks to minimize his crimes. But such defendants don’t have a cheering squad composed of United States senators. If Trump wants to argue he didn’t commit the crimes, as he used to assert in April, fine. He’s entitled to that defense. But the grievous minimization of serious campaign finance violations by members of Trump’s political party further corrode our commitment to our age-old ideal of being a “government of laws, and not of men.” If Hatch thinks too much activity has been criminalized, he is in a welcome position to change the laws as a member of the Senate. He shouldn’t denigrate the law in the process. After all, the campaign disclosure requirements at issue here were enacted by Congress (as key post-Watergate reforms after President Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach went to prison for paying hush money to potential witnesses out of secret cash campaign contributions).
The bad arguments being floated in Trump’s defense are emblematic of a deterioration in respect for the rule of law in this country. The three of us have deep political differences, but we are united in the view that our country comes first and our political parties second. And chief among the values of our country is its commitment to the rule of law. No one, whether a senator or a president, should pretend America is something less.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael D. Cohen said he knew arranging payments during the campaign to quiet two women who claimed to have had affairs with the candidate was wrong. He said Mr. Trump knew it was wrong at the time, too.
“Of course,” Mr. Cohen said, when asked by the ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos whether the president was fully aware of what his lawyer was doing. The interview aired Friday morning.
Around $150 million in student loans will be cancelled in accordance with an Obama-era rule that is being implemented by the Department of Education after over a year of Secretary Betsy DeVos trying to block it, CNN reports.
Details: The Borrower Defense to Repayment rule is "designed to help students cheated by for-profit colleges," and the students having their loans cancelled were attending schools that closed during their enrollment, per CNN. DeVos, who was sued by attorneys general from 18 states and D.C. for delaying the rule's implementation, was ordered to implement the law in October.
With that in mind, we thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the dossier and to assess, to the extent possible, how the substance of Steele’s reporting holds up over time. In this effort, we considered only information in the public domain from trustworthy and official government sources, including documents released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in connection with the criminal cases brought against Paul Manafort, the 12 Russian intelligence officers, the Internet Research Agency trolling operation and associated entities, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. We also considered the draft statement of offense released by author Jerome Corsi, a memorandum released by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff related to the Carter Page FISA applications and admissions directly from certain speakers.
These materials buttress some of Steele’s reporting, both specifically and thematically. The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven.
