January 10, 2019: Trump's Former Personal Lawyer to Testify before Congress

 

1/10/19: Mark your calendars. Set your alarm. Schedule a day of vacation. Shit’s about to get real. 

Donald Trump’s former fixer and longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, has agreed to testify voluntarily, under oath, before the House Oversight Committee. Cohen, who will appear on February 7, has already pled guilty to lying to Congress in a previous session. He will return knowing he’s headed to jail in March. 

Here we should briefly note: If this were North Korea under Kim Jong-un or Iraq under Saddam or Russia under Putin, Cohen would be dead. This might explain why President Trump is always eager to praise authoritarian rulers. You figure he’s jealous of the powers they possess.

(Video added after testimony.)

 

What does Trump have to fear if his former fixer spills six cans of beans? First, Cohen has tapes of conversations (a lawyer may legally tape a client without consent in the State of New York). Second, we know investigators in the Southern District of New York seized hundreds of thousands of pages of documents in raids on Cohen’s home, office, and safe deposit box. Third, Cohen knows where the financial bodies are buried. He can testify about hush money payments during the 2016 campaign and how Trump wanted those payments made, about the secret company they set up, and the documents filled with pseudonyms they used.  

____________________ 

Trump didn’t come forward to correct his fixer.

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Even more damaging, we know Cohen lied about efforts to pursue a mega-million-dollar deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. When collusion was nothing more than a glimmer in James Comey’s eye, Cohen had already started lying, insisting negotiations for a Moscow deal ended in January 2016. 

Trump didn’t come forward to correct his fixer – when it would have been easy. He insisted he had no dealings in Russia. He wouldn’t think of having such dealings because – well – that would be a conflict of interest for a person running for president. (You can have fun and go back and listen to the “Fake News” story from CNN, which we now know was accurate and non-fake). Today we find that Cohen and the president’s current lawyer, Horndog Rudy, agree. Negotiations were continuing right up till Election Day and the payoff could have been huge. Cohen once predicted the deal could be worth “hundreds of millions” for Mr. Trump.

 

So: What potential torpedoes can Cohen put through the hull of the U.S.S. Trump? 

Cohen admits he lied to Congress. Trump surrogates will be going all out, claiming we can’t believe Cohen, because he’s an admitted liar. But what if Cohen can prove he lied to Congress because Trump ordered him to? That’s a torpedo to the boiler room, right there. 

Cohen has hinted that he knows about a planning meeting, prior to the secret Trump Tower New York meeting with Russians, and that Candidate Trump knew all about that earlier meeting. If he can prove that Trump lied again that’s a torpedo that blows off the ship’s rudder. 

Cohen can sink the U.S.S. Trump once and for all, with a shot to the bow, if he reveals tax evasion by Candidate Trump. 

How scared is the president? This week we learn that the White House has hired 17 new lawyers to guard Mr. Trump. 

 TRUMP FOR PRE$IDENT 2016

February 8, 2019: Trump & Co. Keep the U.S. Judicial Branch Going Full Blast

 

2/8/19: IT TURNS OUT American intelligence intercepted a call in 2017. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman can be heard telling underlings he would finish off the journalist Jamal Khashoggi “with a bullet” if he refused to return to Saudi Arabia and end his criticism of the royal family. 

President Trump has said he thinks the Crown Prince is a noble fellow and he’d like him to visit the new U.S. capital at Mar-a-Lago. He can even bring his favorite doctor with the bone saw. 

You never know when you might catch a journalist and need the right kind of saw while traveling. (See: 10/16/18.)

 

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“Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House.” 

PRETTY MUCH everyone agrees there has never been a White House that leaks like this one, with Trump at the helm. 

Experts theorize that this has something to do with the fact so many people working in the White House can’t abide the way the president acts. Reporters for Vanity Fair explain it this way: 

Morale inside the White House, never high to begin with, has turned particularly bleak, according to interviews with 10 former West Wing officials and Republicans close to the president. The issue is that many see Trump himself as the problem. “Trump is hated by everyone inside the White House,” a former West Wing official told me. His shambolic management style, paranoia, and pattern of blaming staff for problems of his own making have left senior White House officials burned out and resentful, sources said. “It’s total misery. People feel trapped,” a former official said. “Trump always needs someone to blame,” a second former official said. Sources said the leak of Trump’s private schedules to Axios – which revealed how little work Trump does – was a signal of how disaffected his staff has become [emphasis added throughout]. (See: 2/3/19.)

 

Even Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney is said to be anxious to leave; and he’s only been on the job for eight weeks.

 

Well, there’s always Rudy…. 

Or not! 

With arrival of the weekend, Rudy Giuliani remains conspicuous by his absence. He has not been seen in public since January 20, when he told The New York Times that the president informed him negotiations on a Trump Tower Moscow deal were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.”  

As the Times explained after that bombshell dropped: 

The new timetable means that Mr. Trump was seeking a deal at the time he was calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia….He was seeking a deal when he gave interviews questioning the legitimacy of NATO, a favorite talking point of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. And he was seeking a deal when, in July 2016, he called on Russia to release hacked Democratic emails that Mr. Putin’s government was rumored at the time to have stolen.

 

Rudy quickly woke up to his mistake (or the president started screaming at him again) and tried to walk back his comments. 

No one has seen him since, kind of like Jamal Khashoggi walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

 

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Michael Cohen.

THE COURT NEWS keeps coming. On Friday, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III denied media requests for release of all court records in the case of Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer.

Pauley ruled that documents related to Cohen’s financial crimes could be released. But documents related to two other felonies had to remain sealed or could be released only in redacted form. 

An observer in court explained: 

The judge said prosecutors had opposed the media requests, saying disclosure “would jeopardize an ongoing investigation and prejudice the privacy rights of uncharged third parties.”

 

…He said the search warrant applications and affidavits supporting them “catalogue an assortment of uncharged individuals and detail their involvement in communications and transactions connected to the campaign finance charges to which Cohen pled guilty.”

 

…The judge added: “At this stage, wholesale disclosure of the materials would reveal the scope and direction of the Government’s ongoing investigation. It would also unveil subjects of the investigation and the potential conduct under scrutiny, the full volume and nature of the evidence gathered thus far, and the sources of information provided to the Government.”

 

In a separate story, Politico added: 

“And if the past is any prologue, unmasking those who are cooperating with the Government’s investigation or who have otherwise provided information to the Government could deter further cooperation with the investigation by ‘subject[ing] those individuals to witness tampering, harassment, or retaliation,’” the judge added.

 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out who might be doing the harassing. And who was doing the witness tampering. And what corpulent orange guy might be subject of the continuing investigation. 

Hint: his or her initials are DJT.

 

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BUT WAIT!!!! There’s more. In separate court proceedings in Washington D.C., federal prosecutors tell a judge that Paul Manafort may have lied to them, despite a plea agreement that was in place, about “an extremely sensitive issue,” in hopes of goosing his chances for a pardon. 

The person with power to pardon Manafort has the same initials as the individual hinted at two paragraphs above. 

DJT. 

Prosecutors also tell Judge Amy Berman Jackson that they believe Manafort lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business buddy, and a man with deep connections to Russian intelligence. Those interactions, prosecutors assure Judge Jackson, go “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” 

Jackson chastises Manafort at one point, making it clear she believes he tried to cover up the truth that he used $125,000 from a pro-Trump political action committee to pay legal bills. 

Andrew Weissman, speaking for the prosecutor’s office, describes that cozy arrangement as, “to put it charitably, a scheme.”