12/17/18: Recent developments in the Mueller probe cannot be soothing to the president’s jangled nerves. In the course of just five days, Horndog Rudy goes on TV to offer the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense of his boss. If Michael Cohen says Trump directed him to make illegal hush money payments and lie during testimony before Congress, Giuliani says you can’t believe a guy like Cohen, because Cohen’s going to “sing” as loud as he must in order to avoid spending three years in jail. He can’t be trusted. “He’s changed his story four or five times.”
“The president’s not under oath.”
George Stephanopoulos, hosting the show on which Rudy appears, replies: “So has the president.”
“The President’s not under oath,” Rudy smiles like a man who has had too many Mimosas at brunch. Then, to make his position clear, he adds that he’s not about to let his client testify under oath. “Over my dead body,” he says.
Let’s recap. According to Rudy:
A) The president can’t lie as long as he’s not under oath.
B) The president is never going to testify under oath.
C) If Trump does testify under oath, lies, and gets caught, no problem. He can pardon himself.
Still, it’s clear the president is unnerved. In one of his tweets, which raises legal experts’ eyebrows, he refers to Cohen as a “rat” because Cohen is cooperating with state and federal prosecutors.
*
STOP A MOMENT and consider the matter of who has changed his story most, Cohen, or Trump. Originally, the president told everyone, including the First Lady, that he didn’t know about hush money payments to two women during his campaign. Cohen testified under oath that Trump did. When it was revealed that documents backed Cohen’s story, the president admitted he knew about the payments, but insisted those payments had nothing to do with his campaign. So, they weren’t campaign finance violations! Then David Pecker, head of American Media Inc., who has immunity from prosecution, testified that Trump knew about the payments all along and asked Pecker to hide them to…protect his campaign.
 |
Stormy Daniels, the porn queen who got a payoff. |
With each passing day, the story spun further and further out of control. Cohen had once claimed any deal to get a Trump Tower built in Moscow ended by January 2016. Now he admitted, and documents supported his testimony, that the deal was in the works as late as the summer of 2016.
The fishy story became even fishier after Giuliani appeared on TV again this week. Now he admitted, well, come to think of it, Trump and his pirate pals were pursuing the deal up until November 2016. Possibly that business deal – with the Russians – was in the works up to Election Day.
Trump himself admitted long ago that working on a deal while running for president would have been a conflict, and said he never pursued it. Now Rudy had no other recourse than to argue that where there is no harm there is no foul. A candidate trying to cash in big with the Russians, that candidate perhaps having worked with Russians hoping to swing the U.S. election? Where’s the harm in that?
The deal was never consummated.
POSTSCRIPT: A report from the Senate Intelligence Committee finds that Russians have been targeting Special Counsel Mueller on social media platforms – because if it’s on Facebook some poor dupe is going to believe it and share with friends and family, along with pictures of meals they have recently eaten.
In one post, Russian operatives spread the story that Mueller had worked with “radical Islamic groups” in the past.
The Russians also spread the word that the Russians had nothing to do with interfering in the 2016 election.
On PayPal, Russians masquerading as Trump supporters sold t-shirts that read, “I SUPPORT AMERICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT.”
No comments:
Post a Comment