Lots of Mueller Action, But What About Russian Collusion? What's Stormy Daniels got to do with it?

[SirLinksALot]

SOURCE: TOWNHALL

URL: https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2018/04/11/lots-of-mueller-action-but-what-about-collusion-n2469638

by Byron York


Remember collusion? The allegation that Donald Trump and his aides coordinated or conspired with Russia to fix the 2016 presidential election is the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation.

Yet Monday saw two developments in the Trump investigation -- one discussed widely in the press, the other not as much -- and neither pointed toward collusion.

In the development that set off a press firestorm, FBI agents raided the office and hotel room of longtime Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, apparently looking for evidence concerning Cohen's role in paying off the porn star Stormy Daniels, who once denied but now says she had a one-night-stand with Trump more than a decade ago.

Cohen's lawyer, Stephen Ryan, said he was told the raid was "in part, a referral by the Office of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller."

The less-noted development was the release of a heavily redacted search warrant from the tax evasion, bank fraud and money laundering case against one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. As expected, the warrant dealt overwhelmingly with allegations of financial crimes against Manafort, but one sentence -- out of 27 paragraphs and sub-paragraphs -- concerned the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Manafort and some Russians who said they had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The Manafort warrant -- executed in a pre-dawn, no-knock, guns-drawn FBI raid on Manafort's apartment while Manafort and his wife were asleep inside -- allowed the FBI to seize "communications, records, documents, and other files involving any of the attendees of the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower," as well as Aras and Emin Agalarov. (The last two are Russians who dealt with Trump in the 2013 Miss Universe pageant held in Moscow.)

So two big stories, both generated by the Mueller investigation. And about the issue at the heart of the Mueller investigation -- not much.

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[Sanguine]

Here's my best guess as to what is happening here.  First and pretty obviously, Mueller has found nothing to clearly implicate Trump with (though the question of Trump Towers in Moscow is still in play).  Cohen, since he claimed he paid Ms. Daniels with his own money, has essentially admitted to making an illegal campaign contribution.  Mueller and Co., is frustrated and decided to go ahead and prosecute the more simple to prove case against Cohen, and if anything implicating Trump is found in the process, that would be great from their point of view.  Additionally, if Cohen knows that they are willing to prosecute him (a la DeSouza) there's a small chance that Cohen would turn on Trump and give them something real to work with.