Former Trump Organization executive vice-president Michael Cohen is on Capitol Hill again on Wednesday, testifying for a second time in a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee. It’s not clear precisely what they’ll be discussing, but committee chairman Adam Schiff spoke to the media after Cohen’s first appearance and made clear that they’re focused on documents.
“We are in communication with, obviously, Mr. Cohen and his counsel about further document requests following our interview today that we’ll be able to discuss at our next session,” Schiff said after Cohen had finished for the day. “We also went through documents in our possession, dozens of documents in our possession with Mr. Cohen, but we have additional document requests that we will be in discussion with him about.”
Of course, the documents are supposed to help explain criminal conspiracies involving the president of the United States. It’s beginning to look like the case against Donald Trump is going to be a demonstration of truly pervasive criminality.
In October 2018, the New York Times produced overwhelming evidence that Trump has been a world class tax-cheat. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post has already won a Pulitzer Prize for his exposure of Trump’s fraudulent charities and charitable giving. House Financial Services Committee chairwoman Maxine Waters is going to be investigating the Donald J. Trump Foundation, but it has already been shut down by the then-New York attorney general who said her investigation found “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.”
After Michael Cohen said in his public testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Trump has engaged in insurance fraud, the New York Department of Financial Services issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization’s insurance brokerage firm. Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice’s Southern District of New York “served a very broad subpoena on the Trump inaugural committee.”
Then there is the emoluments issue:
Prosecutors for the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia have subpoenaed a company owned by Donald Trump, seeking information about the president’s possible violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. According to The Times of London, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh and D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine demanded the financial filings of DJT Holdings LLC—which owns the president’s Scotland resorts, as well as Trump International Hotel in Washington—as part of an investigation into whether profits from Trump’s D.C. hotel are “flowing to the president through his affiliated entities.”
Add to all of this that the president is an un-indicted coconspirator in the hush money crimes Michael Cohen has already pleaded guilty to having committed at Trump’s direction, and we have an enormous amount of criminal behavior to look at before we even begin to look at the Mueller Report.
With House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler having issuer 81 Russia-related subpoenas on Monday, some are arguing that the Democrats don’t have enough focus. That’s certainly the argument that law professor Jonathan Turley made in The Hill on Wednesday. Turley makes some good points in his piece, but I think what he’s missing is that the best case against Trump’s continued presence on the Oval Office is the one that simply overwhelms all doubters. First you demonstrate that the man is manifestly a criminal. Once the public is convinced of this, the specific rationales for removing him almost don’t matter.
In the grand scheme of things, the Mueller Report could be almost an afterthought.
I think an important point Congressman Nadler made earlier this week is that not all crimes are impeachable offences and not all impeachable offences are crimes.
We need a public record before the impeachment process can start
It was obvious enough, during the campaign, that Trump was a manifestly incompetent candidate and a truly nasty human being. And even though it was not widely publicized , it was also obvious that Trump was pro-authoritarian, especially WRT Putin.
But it has been his behavior during his presidency that is truly criminal and, I would argue, treasonous, again, especially WRT Putin. The GOP’s complete lack of oversight over Trump’s behavior makes them complicit in Trump’s grifting, corruption and treasonous behavior.
I’ve started referring to him as RICO Don. With the now 9+ pending investigations in NY (SDNY & NYAG) and with Maxine Waters already inside the doors of Deutsche Bank the argument in my uneducated legal mind is getting better and better for a giant RICO case where the evidence is no longer drips out piecemeal but firehoses into patterns that the general public and Putin’s trolls and even Fox can’t turn their backs on.
If Putin’s game all along was indeed to disrupt our democracy, surely he will time a troll event to dump not just on Trump next spring but will also start releasing the RNC hacked material from ’16 so to jam up the process? Maybe not, there’s a calculation that Putin may have boxed himself in, if he destroys the Rep’s overall the Dems could survive and then he’d have a real fight on his hand. So the question remains, how will Putin treat RICO Don’s presidency going forward?
It might be that the House investigations are meant to protect Mueller by making his report one constituent part of the larger investigation instead of the investigation. DT screaming ‘Witch Hunt’ and ‘McCarthyism’ at Congress takes the heat off Mueller.
I’m super pleased by all this and am not about to nitpick about process. I pretty much stop listening to any sentence that starts with: The Democrats should….
one that simply overwhelms all doubters….
I think this is spot-on. And if it leads people to a general impression of Trump as a liar, he’s toast.
Trump?
A criminal!!!???
I’m shocked!!!
Shocked, I say!!!
Why didn’t someone mention alla this when he was running for office?
It’s not like it was some kind of secret!!!
But NOOOOoooo…
Y’all wanted to laugh him offstage.
Riiiight…
That was like trying to laugh a Mafia Don offstage.
They don’t go easy.
Ever!!!
I tried to warn y’all.
I really did.
Lots of times.
Sigh…
AG
I’ve thought for a long time that there was too much emphasis on and trust in the Mueller report. But one thing that really bothers me – some of the current investigations (the insurance fraud investigation in New York is one example) concern activities from literally decades ago. Where were these investigators back then? Why is there so little attention to white collar crime? It does more damage than a kid with a joint.
A kid with a joint faced more consequences than these white-collar criminals did. Just think about all the crooks that helped crash the economy in 2009. Not only did they not face consequences (Obama and Holder made sure of that, unfortunately) they were even made whole with taxpayer dollars, paid for by the very taxpayers these crooks stole from causing many to lose their homes. Talk about twisting the knife.
There is no crevice from which evidence is not festering, and the Democrats are just getting started. Grandiloquence From The Wise Ones about focus, at this stage? Cue the eye roll.
As the evidence grows and grows in the public view (except, of course, in Faux Noise World), I hope the Repugnicans in Congress will be made to own it: this is what they have actively encouraged for (more than) two years, and this is what many of them are now fighting as ostentatiously as they can to defend.
I do wonder how Faux Noise will respond. At what point will Murdochs et al decide that they’ve gotten all the mileage they can out of Rump And Dolt, and it’s time to champion another fascist idol reliably friendly to their bottom line?
Big wild card: the economy. The last “correction” was over ten years ago. We’re about due–they seem to happen every ten to twelve years–and the stewards of our politics over the last decade have done everything they could to guarantee that this next will happen, and will be a lollapalooza.
“At what point will Murdochs et al decide that they’ve gotten all the mileage they can … ?”
Maybe at the point when it starts becoming clear that they are accessories …
I am trying to watch lead indicators: housing starts, majors purchases (e.g., automobiles), freight traffic. The impression I get is that a slowdown is definitely underway. Basically what is going on with the real economy? The equities markets’ valuations always have been the stuff of fantasy. Those will lag behind. The next correction will do my pension no good once equities markets crash. I still have my health, right?
Systemically, we have little wiggle room to stimulate a recessionary economy, especially if the crash is even remotely like the one from last decade. The prime interest rate is still near historical lows. I suppose the Fed could drop it down into negative territory (something that I think might have been considered a decade ago). Beyond that, there would have to be considerable cooperation among legislators and the White House to take the edge off a major recession. That level of cooperation barely existed a decade ago. It does not exist now. The next crash will also occur at a time when white nationalists have been given a voice in the White House and to a certain degree in Congress. The scapegoating and potential violence elicited from scapegoating should concern us all. This will be ugly and violent in a way that we have not seen in a very long time.
. . . re: worries about retirement account in stock fund (a pittance by investment-counselor-advice standards, but still significant in my world).
I keep telling myself when the Dow is at/near record highs, as now (e.g., at least above 25K, though I just looked and it’s down ~140 on the day) to get the chunk that’s in stock funds shifted to the safer, more-conservative mix of the rest of the pittance. Had my finger hovering over the “send” button for an order to do exactly that soon after Trump’s election (figuring such an obvious catastrophe would surely manage to tank the Obama Recovery sooner or later, if the markets were remotely rational, which they obviously aren’t). Now glad I didn’t, cuz it woulda cost me some thousands in value. But the fear revives with every “mini-correction” followed by recovery like the recent one.
Don’t think Fed can drop prime to actually negative, but don’t know that, might well be wrong. I do remember that interest returns on bonds went negative during the great recession, i.e., people were paying us just to park their money for safe-keeping even though they LOST money doing so. Which is Exhibit A for what bullshit the fake “debt crisis” ginned-up and flogged by the Deficit Scolds always is.
The work is finally underway to demonstrate that Donald Trump (like Adolf Hitler before him) is a political criminal, i.e. a criminal who entered politics.
The chief difficulty here is that so many of Der Trumper’s crimes were undertaken before his (electoral college) election in 2016, and I suppose there is an argument that impeachment is meant to be undertaken for crimes and offenses that the prez has committed while in office. The counterargument is that the Congress certainly can take note that the duly-elected prez turned out to be an actual (untried) felon, based on competent evidence.
One could of course say that the data was right in front of the faces of the incompetent white electorate that Repub candidate Trump was a conman, scammer and financial criminal when they went into the polls that fateful day in Nov 2016. Intellectual disgrace stares from every Repub face, as the poet might say. But the fools could also say “we didn’t know!”, since it’s not like Trumper’s criminality was especially well-reported by the useless corporate teevee media.
In drafting the voluminous Articles of Impeachment there will have to be baskets of criminal acts, like the obvious campaign finance violations, and baskets of non-criminal acts that are moral and equitable offenses against the government and country, such as the pervasive and pathological use of Goebbelsian Big Lies, misleading the 2016 electorate by a variety of hush money payments, running a campaign that colluded with a foreign power to throw the national prez election of 2016, and (now) declaring a patently baseless national emergency in the style and manner of an unconstrained autocrat.
What is critical is that articles be presented and voted on and a senate trial held, whatever the outcome, because the Congress (and nation) simply must respond to a clearly criminal prez; otherwise the (failed) 1789 constitution is even more of a failure than one can imagine. It is foolish to wait months and months until all the evidence has been amassed, as it is quite clear right now that Der Trumper thinks himself a lawless autocrat operating without legal constraint.
The evidence will accumulate as the impeachment process advances. Time’s a-wastin’, Dems…as you can see, no one else will do this for you.