Cohen’s pleas concocted by prosecutors to snare TrumpThe Hill, Dec 10, 2018, Mark Penn
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One can say today that these New York prosecutors, acolytes of fired U.S. District Attorney Preet Bharra, have learned that the “plea’s the thing wherein to catch the king.†First, they went after the man, not the crime, and turned up millions in unpaid taxes and some bank-loan misrepresentations by Cohen. At that point, they convinced him to cave for the sake of his family; the trick was to get him to plead guilty to supposedly two campaign finance “felonies,†and then vaguely implicate the president as directing them (which Trump denies).
Despite promises to the contrary from prosecutors, they threw their star witness off the bus anyway, making him the biggest chump in this drama after he hired attorney Lanny Davis and burned all his bridges with his former client. Once they had the guilty pleas in hand, the prosecutors no longer needed Cohen; they trashed him as a greedy liar and called for substantial jail time.
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What revelation would have had greater impact on transparency in the election — that Democrats had paid a British spy to gather dirt on Trump from Russia, or that Trump had a consensual one-night affair?
Perhaps the biggest difference between oppo research and paying for nondisclosure of an affair is that one is definitely a campaign expense and the other is a personal expense not covered by election law. When prosecutors brought a similar case against former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.),
they failed to get a conviction and it came out that FEC auditors had determined that the payments from donors to his mistress were not a campaign expense at all.
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I am hard-pressed to believe that the stories of brief encounters with these two women, neither of whom claim any harassment or abuse, would have had any effect on the election in the first place. They would have primarily hurt Trump’s wife and children, and it’s only because of the election and declining media standards that these women had increased marketability for their stories. These are personal expenses that Trump, a frequent target of such schemes, would have likely made anyway.
Step by step, the special counsel and New York prosecutors are showing that they regard Trump protégés as little more than pawns in an all-out effort to remove the president. This is no honest inquiry respecting the will of the people. Never before has an administration, a family and a campaign been treated in this fashion by prosecutors who have created far more crimes than they have found.
More:
https://itk.thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/420523-cohens-pleas-concocted-by-prosecutors-to-snare-trump