New evidence suggesting that President Donald Trump directed his onetime fixer Michael Cohen to break campaign finance laws could constitute an impeachable offense, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York told CNN’s Jack Tapper Sunday.
Nadler is the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which drafts articles of impeachment.
“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said. “Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question. But, certainly, they would be impeachable offenses, because, even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”
Nadler went on to say that the outgoing Republican majority in Congress effectively shielded the president from legal exposure, but that the new Democratic majority would not do so. From his new perch as Judiciary chair, Nadler is expected to investigate the administration on a range of topics.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a charging memo recommending a “substantial” prison sentence for Cohen on Friday. The document alleges that Cohen executed a $130,000 hush payment to Stephanie Clifford, who appears in adult films under the name “Stormy Daniels,” at Trump’s direction.
Prosecutors and election law experts have suggested the payment amounts to an “in kind” campaign contribution which should have been reported to federal officials.
Clifford has since sued Cohen to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement she signed in exchange for the settlement. As Tapper noted in Sunday’s segment, prosecutors have not yet publicly established that Cohen was working at Trump’s behest.
The White House maintained the president’s innocence in a pair of statements late Friday, while Trump himself tweeted that Friday’s filing “totally clears the president.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Nadler said he does not agree with Department of Justice guidelines, which provide that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Those guidelines govern the special counsel’s investigation, though federal courts have never explored the issue in earnest.
Nancy Pelosi Announces Democrat Plan to Go After Trump’s Tax Returns
The Supreme Court could ultimately decide that question and related issues that the Mueller inquiry has raised, like whether Trump must comply with a subpoena.
Nadler Floats Impeachment, Says New Mueller Revelations Could Justify Removing Trump
By Daily Caller
Kevin Daley on December 9, 2018
New evidence suggesting that President Donald Trump directed his onetime fixer Michael Cohen to break campaign finance laws could constitute an impeachable offense, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York told CNN’s Jack Tapper Sunday.
Nadler is the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which drafts articles of impeachment.
“They would be impeachable offenses,” Nadler said. “Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question. But, certainly, they would be impeachable offenses, because, even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.”
Nadler went on to say that the outgoing Republican majority in Congress effectively shielded the president from legal exposure, but that the new Democratic majority would not do so. From his new perch as Judiciary chair, Nadler is expected to investigate the administration on a range of topics.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a charging memo recommending a “substantial” prison sentence for Cohen on Friday. The document alleges that Cohen executed a $130,000 hush payment to Stephanie Clifford, who appears in adult films under the name “Stormy Daniels,” at Trump’s direction.
Prosecutors and election law experts have suggested the payment amounts to an “in kind” campaign contribution which should have been reported to federal officials.
Clifford has since sued Cohen to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement she signed in exchange for the settlement. As Tapper noted in Sunday’s segment, prosecutors have not yet publicly established that Cohen was working at Trump’s behest.
The White House maintained the president’s innocence in a pair of statements late Friday, while Trump himself tweeted that Friday’s filing “totally clears the president.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Nadler said he does not agree with Department of Justice guidelines, which provide that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Those guidelines govern the special counsel’s investigation, though federal courts have never explored the issue in earnest.
Nancy Pelosi Announces Democrat Plan to Go After Trump’s Tax Returns
The Supreme Court could ultimately decide that question and related issues that the Mueller inquiry has raised, like whether Trump must comply with a subpoena.
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“He directed me to make the payments”: Cohen says Trump instructed illegal hush money payments
Michael Cohen sat down for an interview on ABC after being sentenced to three years in prison.
By Emily Stewart on December 14, 2018 9:10 am
Michael Cohen exits a federal court after a sentencing hearing in December 2018. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who once said he would take a bullet for the president, would like you to know he’s sorry now that he’s been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple crimes.
Cohen spoke with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for an interview aired on Good Morning America on Friday. He said he followed a “bad path” out of loyalty to Trump and that he would “not be the villain” of Trump’s story.
Cohen on Wednesday pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud charges related to his taxi medallion business, lying to Congress about discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow, and campaign finance violations by way of hush money payments to two women who alleged they had affairs with Trump. He has cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and has engaged in what prosecutors in the Southern District of New York described as “selective cooperation” in an effort to reduce his sentence.
Cohen has been on an ongoing apology tour of sorts since coming under legal scrutiny after the FBI raided his home, office, and hotel room in April, and Friday’s interview was a continuation of that. He denied Trump’s claims that Cohen has set out to embarrass the president of the United States.
“It is absolutely not true,” Cohen said.
He emphasized that much of what he did was at the direction of the president, saying that “nothing at the Trump Organization was ever done unless it was run through Mr. Trump.”
Cohen arranged a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from speaking out about her alleged affair with Trump prior to the election, and helped arrange a settlement with National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. in August 2016 to keep Playboy model Karen McDougal from speaking out about her alleged affair with the president.
“He directed me to make the payments. He directed me to become involved in these matters,” Cohen said.
Of Trump’s denials, he said, “I don’t think there’s anybody who believes that.” He also said that Trump “of course” knew the payments were wrong and that he was “very concerned” about how news of the affairs would affect the 2016 election.
“He knows the truth. I know the truth. Others know the truth,” Cohen told Stephanopoulos. “And here is the truth: People of the United States of America, people of the world, don’t believe what he is saying. The man doesn’t tell the truth. And it is sad that I should take responsibility for his dirty deeds.”
He lamented giving “loyalty to someone who truthfully does not deserve loyalty.”
Don’t feel too sorry for Michael Cohen
Cohen was for years a fierce attack dog for Trump. He once said he would “take a bullet” for the president and was one of his most loyal defenders.
He’s since changed his tune, dropping the loyalty act and instead casting himself as a tragic figure who is deeply sorry for his misdeeds.
Instead of talking about his fealty to Trump, he now talks about his family and the country. He launched a GoFundMe crowdfunding page to help pay his legal bills. Prior to the midterm elections, Cohen, the former Republican National Committee deputy finance chair, encouraged people to go out and vote (against Trump).
While it appears as though Cohen has given helpful evidence to prosecutors in the Mueller investigation and at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), it’s not as though he’s doing so just out of the goodness of his heart. He got caught for multiple crimes, and if he hadn’t, who knows what would have happened.
Cohen on GMA said he’s “done with lying” and “being loyal to President Trump,” saying that his loyalty instead “belongs to my wife, my daughter, my son, and this country.”
Stephanopoulos asked why anyone should believe him — which, given Cohen’s track record, seems fair.
“Because the special counsel stated emphatically that the information that I gave to them is credible and helpful,” Cohen replied. “There’s a substantial amount of information that they possessed that corroborates the fact that I am telling the truth.”
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XFrequent Trump critic George Conway ripped the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Friday for saying alleged violations of campaign finance law were not a “big crime” because nobody was killed or robbed.
Conway, whose critiques of Trump have made him a social media star given his marriage to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, altered the presidential oath to include Giuliani’s claim in his tweet.
“‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, except where nobody gets killed or robbed,’” Conway tweeted.
Manafort plea agreement brought this out:
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Exclusive: Paul Manafort advised White House on how to attack and discredit investigation of President Trump
We now have details as to how the indicted former campaign manager worked with the president to undermine federal law enforcement.
By Murray Waas on December 14, 2018 11:15 am
Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, exits the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse, Feb. 28, 2018 in Washington, DC. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Part of
The Vox guide to Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation
Paul Manafort, who served as the manager for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, provided advice to the president and senior White House officials on the FBI’s Russia investigation during the earliest days of the Trump administration. He gave guidance on how to undermine and discredit the FBI’s inquiry into whether the president, his campaign aides, and family members conspired with the Russian Federation and its intelligence services to covertly defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, according to government records and interviews with individuals familiar with the matter. Manafort himself was under criminal investigation by the FBI during this same time, a fact then known to the White House.
Last Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller alleged in court filings that Manafort told “multiple discernible lies” to FBI agents and prosecutors, in violation of the cooperation agreement between Manafort and the special counsel’s office. Among those, Mueller charged, were lies by Manafort to investigators that he had not been in contact with anyone in the White House.
“After signing the plea agreement, Manafort stated he had no direct or indirect communications with anyone in the administration while they were in the administration,” the special counsel said in a court pleading, “and that he never asked anyone to try and communicate a message to anyone in the administration on any subject.” Citing text messages, Manafort’s electronic records, and witness interviews, the special counsel wrote: “The evidence demonstrates that Manafort lied about his contacts.”
Those contacts continued after Trump and his associates knew that Manafort was under investigation by the FBI; after he was indicted by two federal grand juries on more than two dozen felony counts of money laundering, bank fraud, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice; and after having been convicted by a federal jury of 10 of those felonies while awaiting trial on other charges. And now we have learned, thanks to reports from the New York Times and filings in federal court by the special counsel, that those contacts continued even after Manafort became a cooperating witness against the president. The court filings, however, did not disclose any information regarding the subjects of the contacts between Manafort and the White House.
Manafort advised administration officials in the spring and summer of 2017 on how to politically undermine the FBI and Mueller investigation in three ways, according to government records and interviews with three people with knowledge of the contacts. He also gave them advice on how some of the witnesses against both him and the president might be discredited. In short, Manafort and Trump were working together to discredit the investigators as well as potential witnesses.
Manafort urged the president to attack the FBI
First, Manafort advised the president and his political surrogates to more aggressively and directly attack the FBI and other elements of the federal law enforcement apparatus investigating his administration. The goal of Manafort’s advice was to “delegitimize” the investigation itself, one person familiar with the advice explained to me. Manafort wanted nothing less than to “declare a public relations war on the FBI,” this same person said. Another goal was to discredit then-FBI Director James Comey and other senior FBI officials — as it had become increasingly likely they would be witnesses against the president.
Trump later did just that, but it’s unclear what role, if any, Manafort’s advice played in the president deciding to go on the attack. Other, more influential advisers made similar recommendations to Trump. And Trump likely did not need to hear that advice from Manafort or anyone else. As first lady Melania Trump once said of her husband: “As you may know by now, when you attack him he will punch back 10 times harder.”
Manafort also advised a senior administration official, through an intermediary, to attack the Justice Department, the FBI, and Obama administration officials for seeking court-authorized warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to eavesdrop on Manafort and a second campaign aide to Trump, Carter Page, as part of counterintelligence and criminal investigations into whether Manafort, Page, and others had conspired with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.
FISA warrants are granted only when the court is presented with sufficient evidence that the person who would be the target of surveillance may be acting on behalf of a foreign power, and the legal threshold to obtain such a warrant is high. The Foreign Intelligence Service Court allowed for the electronic surveillance of Manafort prior to, and subsequent to, his role in the Trump campaign.
Trump alleged that then-President Barack Obama authorized the wiretapping of him and his campaign aides as part of an “illegal” scheme to engage in political espionage. Such allegations have since become central to the president’s attacks on the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Mueller investigation — even though Trump and his allies have yet to produce any evidence to show that any of this is true.
As part of these efforts, Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill — most notably, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the outgoing chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — made public sensitive classified information that endangered the lives of intelligence sources and interfered with ongoing criminal investigations. In May 2018, the Justice Department wrote to Nunes warning that information he was about to make public would “risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations and interference with intelligence activities.” Nunes released much of the information anyway. Trump himself ordered the declassification of other intelligence information that law enforcement and intelligence officials warned would do similar damage.
Attacking the use of FISA warrants had no effect on the outcome of Manafort’s criminal case. But a person with firsthand knowledge of Manafort’s thinking — and that of Manafort’s defense team — told me they believed discrediting the FISA process and, more broadly, the federal criminal investigation of him and other Trump campaign aides would make it more politically feasible for Trump to pardon Manafort.
Manafort urged the president to attack the DNC
Second, Manafort counseled the White House to allege — albeit with no evidence to back up said charges — that the pro-Western Ukrainian government had colluded with the Democratic National Committee to try to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election. A source with direct knowledge of the matter told me that the White House adopted Manafort’s recommendation in the summer of 2017 to specifically target Alexandra Chalupa, a political strategist and consultant for the DNC, for allegedly working with Ukrainian officials to hurt Trump’s candidacy. Despite a torrent of allegations, no evidence has surfaced that Chalupa or the DNC did anything wrong.
Acting on Manafort’s advice, on July 10, 2017, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders encouraged reporters to investigate how “the Democrat National Committee coordinated opposition research directly with the Ukrainian Embassy.” That same week, Fox News’s Sean Hannity amplified the allegations evening after evening on his show. Likewise, Republicans on Capitol Hill called for investigations of the “Ukrainian matter.” On July 25, 2017, Trump tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign – ‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G.”
On August 9, 2017, Matthew Whitaker (now the acting attorney general) and a conservative advocacy group he then headed, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), formally asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate the DNC’s dealings with Chalupa. The complaint was largely based on scant evidence and erroneous information; the FEC has given no indication since that it will investigate the matter further.
Even though the allegations had no factual basis to prove anything improper, they were effective propaganda. The White House made its claims shortly after the first public disclosures that Donald Trump Jr. had hosted a Trump Tower meeting between a self-described intermediary for the Russian Federation and himself, Jared Kushner, and Manafort, in which the Russians promised “dirt” on Clinton. The White House was attempting to draw a parallel between its meetings with foreigners and the DNC’s via Chalupa.
But the comparison has always been a facile one, and the White House and its surrogates have not been able to prove any wrongdoing by their counterparts. The Russian Federation — an adversary of the United States — engaged in a covert intelligence effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort agreed to a meeting with individuals they were told were associated with the Russian government to obtain “dirt” on Clinton. Don Jr. in particular was acting on behalf of his father and his presidential campaign. It is illegal for a political campaign to accept any help from a foreign individual, foreign entity, or former government, and illegal not to disclose it; that is, in part, one of the reasons the Trump Tower meeting has also been a focus of special counsel Mueller’s investigation.
Chalupa looked into Manafort’s role as an adviser to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — who wanted to cut ties with the European Union and become more closely aligned with Russia — and set out to sound the alarm. At one point, she even organized a protest in Manafort’s hometown of New Britain, Connecticut, in which protesters held up signs saying, “Putin, hands off the US election.” But those endeavors were unrelated to her work for the Democratic National Committee, where she had been the co-chair of the DNC’s affiliate the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Council during the 2016 presidential election.
When Chalupa brought up Manafort with anyone at the DNC, they were largely disinterested, and in July 2016, she left her part-time consulting role at the DNC to work full time on her human rights advocacy. The DNC and the Clinton campaign have said that they were uninvolved with her efforts, and no evidence has surfaced to contradict that claim.
Manafort urged the president to attack Clinton and the Steele dossier
Third, in early 2017, Manafort provided the White House specific information on how Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign had sponsored research into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. More specifically, Manafort provided information to the White House as to how to discredit the so-called Steele dossier, a report written by Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk for the British intelligence agency MI6, about alleged ties that Trump and his associates had to Russia. (Manafort provided background to the White House’s attorneys about specific allegations and information in the dossier that he said was suspect.)
Manafort also recommended that Trump play up the fact that the work had been commissioned by a private investigation firm hired by the Clinton campaign, according to a former administration official familiar with the effort.
Manafort’s contacts with the White House continued even after his cooperation with Mueller. Without telling prosecutors, Manafort’s defense attorneys were secretly providing details of their client’s cooperation with the special counsel to the president’s legal team, in an apparent effort by Manafort to undermine the investigation or perhaps win a pardon from Trump. In the process, Manafort may have thus helped Trump tailor his answers to questions recently provided to the special counsel’s office.
Harry Litman, a former US attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, has since commented: “The open pipeline between cooperator and suspect Trump may have been not on only extraordinary but also criminal. … What purpose other than an attempt to ‘influence, obstruct, or impede’ the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering.”
In short, in trying to cover up and maneuver for a pardon, Manafort and others may have committed even more crimes. Each “discernible lie” Manafort told is a potential new felony charge of lying to federal investigators, perjury, obstruction of justice, or combination thereof. Of obvious interest to the special counsel is whether others, most notably White House officials, conspired with Manafort to lie, mislead investigators, and possibly obstruct justice, and what, specifically, the president of the United States knew about all of this.
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