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Did Cohen break the law in order to block release the Hollywood Access video? Enquiring investigators want to know:

“The F.B.I. agents who raided the office and hotel of President Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, were seeking details on his relationship with the Trump campaign and his efforts to suppress negative information about Mr. Trump, according to three people briefed on the matter.”

“Prosecutors are interested in whether Mr. Cohen, who had no official role in the 2016 campaign, coordinated with it to quash the release of anything detrimental to it and whether that violated campaign finance laws — a new front in the investigation into Mr. Cohen.”

“The warrant executed Monday by the agents was striking in its breadth, according to those people. It demanded documents related to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, and to other materials related to secret agreements Mr. Cohen made with women in exchange for them not speaking publicly about sexual encounters with Mr. Trump.”

The reason for its breadth is that what they are looking to ascertain is a clear pattern of conduct by Cohen on Trump’s behalf. When you look at the tactics Cohen and other Trump associates employed to keep the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories quiet-an offer of payments, threats-logically investigators want to see in what other cases this same pattern repeated itself-including regarding witnesses in the Mueller probe.

UPDATE: We now know that both Paul Manafort and Roger Stone engaged in witness tampering with Stone making violent threats against both Randy Credico and his dog.

And while this is not a Mueller investigation-and it isn’t directly about Russia-it has implications for Mueller and Russia-for starters Mueller is investigating obstruction of justice and if Trump employed these sorts of tactics to keep women who he had affairs with quiet it’s  pretty plausible he did the same in trying to keep potential witnesses in the Mueller probe quiet.

And indeed, we’ve seen him essentially declare open season on all potential FBI witnesses to the Comey firing-Jim Rybicki, James Baker, Andy McCabe…

“Agents also seized communications between Cohen and Trump during the height of the Hollywood Access phase.”

UPDATE: Note that if collusion happened a very likely instance was the timing of the release of the Podesta emails just 1 hour and 40 minutes after the Hollywood Access tape broke.

“The warrant also covered emails and other documents that could reveal Mr. Cohen’s private communications with Mr. Trump during a tense period in the presidential campaign when Mr. Trump confronted the possibility of embarrassing details of his extramarital affairs. And it delved deeply into Mr. Cohen’s past, including documents about Mr. Cohen’s personal and business finances, including his work as a New York taxi fleet manager.”

“The additional details the agents were seeking came a day after it was revealed that the authorities sought documents from Mr. Cohen related to payments made to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump, Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels, as well as information on the role of the publisher of The National Enquirer in silencing the women.”

Trump has whined a lot about ‘hardened Democrats’ running the Russia investigation-’18 angry Democrats’- while it’s doubtful there are 18 Democrats at the FBI-but the investigator in SDNY is actually a Republican who spoke in support of George W. Bush at the RNC  2004 convention:

“The investigation is being run by Robert S. Khuzami, whose boss, Geoffrey S. Berman, the interim United States attorney in Manhattan, has recused himself. Mr. Khuzami is a veteran federal prosecutor who spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention in support of President George W. Bush and later led the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Obama administration.”

But then Andy McCabe, and both Mueller and Comey  are lifelong Republicans and that hasn’t stopped Trump’s absurd claims either. Alternative facts you know…

“Though the raids on Mr. Cohen’s office and hotel room were overseen by Mr. Khuzami, people close to Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen regard the investigation as a surreptitious attempt by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to pry into Mr. Trump’s personal life by using other prosecutors as his proxy in focusing on a lawyer who has represented him for more than a decade.”

What appointing this case to SDNY does do is insure it against any attempt to obstruct it-even if Mueller were fired this case will go on; nothing will divert it.

FN: Or at least so it seemed before Trump replaced Jeff Sessions with Coverup AG Bill Barr-

End of FN.

Post the raid of Cohen’s offices, Trump has reportedly changed his tune on his previous stated eagerness to a sit down interview with Mueller.

FN: Of course this was just a posture-Mueller would ultimately bend and not only let Trump avoid a sit down interview but even his namesake son-compare this with the faux outrage over Clinton’s lawyer being at her interview-at least she went!

End of FN

“Since Mr. Mueller was appointed last May, Mr. Trump had taken a largely nonconfrontational approach to the investigation, providing tens of thousands of pages of emails, notes, memos and other documents as part of an effort to show he has nothing to hide and to hasten the end of the investigation.”

Nonconfrontational? He contemplated firing Mueller in both June and December of last year. He also has, as noted above, systematically targeted potential FBI agents to the Comey firing. It’s true that his legal team was able to talk him out of firing Mueller in those previous episodes; but that was by convincing him that the probe would be ending soon and they wouldn’t find anything on him. The raids of Cohen’s offices totally blows those assurances out of the water.

UPDATE: Today-February 15, 2019-the danger is not that Mueller will be fired but that, William Barr, the same AG that pardoned the Iran-Contra co-conspirators in the height of Bush Sr.’s reelection campaign will do Trump’s dirty work-will he let Trump pardon his own co-conspirators? The most tangible fear today is that Barr will bury the Mueller report-Ken Dilianian sure makes it sound as if it’s quite possible we will see little. 

“When Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr released the report of his investigation of President Bill Clinton in 1998, all of Washington paused to digest the 453-page document (plus 2,000 pages of appendixes), with its salacious details of the president’s sexual dalliance with an intern. It was made public at the same time it was sent to Congress.”

“The Mueller report won’t be anything like that. Starr operated under the now-defunct independent counsel law, meaning he called many of his own shots, outside the purview of the Justice Department. Mueller is a special counsel under Justice Department supervision, subject to very specific regulations.”

“Here is the sum total of what the rules say about a final report:

“At the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.”

“What’s more, a 1999 document outlining that rule in the federal register criticizes the way in which independent counsel reports like Starr’s were made public, saying that a public prosecutors report “provides an incentive to over-investigate, in order to avoid potential public criticism for not having turned over every stone, and creates potential harm to individual privacy interests.”

So while the Ken Starr report was criticized-after the fact and after it did so much to sully the Clinton brand, perhaps making it impossible that Hillary could ever be President-in theory it could benefit the GOP doubly-they got all the benefits of their own excesses and those excesses were so outrageous their opponents are now prevented from gaining the same benefit…

UPDATE: In retrospect ending the Independent Counsel rule was classic fighting the last war which is why the Dems should be wary of making too many prospective proposals-rather than imposing restrospective accountability-which they are now doing with the opening of the impeachment inquiry-let’s face it an Independent Counsel was what was needed in dealing with Trump’s unprecedented obstruction.

The fight between Trump and Mueller was always pretty asymmetrical-Trump would make up any lie or canard he wanted while Mueller said nothing.

If Dilanian is right there will be a tremendous public outcry-which is the one reason I do think we will get to see what evidence Mueller has-the public won’t stand for it being buried and the Democrats have vowed to make sure it goes public, including subpoenaing the report.

Indeed, having just said that the danger is more we don’t see the report than that Mueller is literally fired you do have to wonder if Matt Schlapp knows something we don’t:

“A top conservative activist who’s married to a senior aide to the president predicted Thursday that Robert Mueller’s days as special counsel are numbered, creating a frenzy.”

“Now that the Senate confirmed President Trump’s new attorney general, American Conservative Union head Matt Schlapp suggested in a tweet that Mueller would soon be given the boot.”

‘Tomorrow will be the first day that President Trump will have a fully operational confirmed Attorney General. Let that sink in. Mueller will be gone soon,’ he wrote.

“Schlapp’s wife Mercedes is the White House director of strategic communications.”

What does he know that makes him say that-did his wife tell him something?All through 2017-2018 I-and millions in the #Resistance-argued that legitimacy of our system of government itself was on the ballot and now we see how true that was. While we don’t know what Schlapp bases this on-did his wife say something to that effect? we do have Schiff-Nadler-Cummings-Waters on the job and they’ve now made it clear-Schiff has been very clear-that they are not waiting for Mueller.

UPDATE: Mueller, of course, wasn’t fired, but you wonder what Schlapp may have been referring to as there has been questions as to wether Barr pulled the plug on Mueller early-Mueller did deny it in the July hearing.

End of UPDATE

Indeed, they’re ready to deal immediately with whatever the latest abuse is-like the current real national emergency over Trump’s fake ‘national emergency.’

President Trump’s attempt to strip Congress of its duty by declaring a national emergency subverts key principles laid out in our Constitution. @HouseJudiciary is demanding answers: https://t.co/kgunSwfBji

— Rep. Nadler (@RepJerryNadler) February 16, 2019

End of UPDATE.

“It is not clear what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played regarding the “Access Hollywood” tape, which was made public a month before the election on one of the more memorable days of the campaign. On that day, Oct. 7, the Obama administration called out Russia for meddling in the election and the first batch of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign were released.”

“But Mr. Cohen has acknowledged paying $130,000 to Ms. Clifford, who said she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump and signed a nondisclosure agreement promising not to discuss the matter. Mr. Cohen has insisted there was no relationship, but that he sought to keep a damaging story from emerging regardless.”

“Mr. Cohen also had a long relationship with David J. Pecker, the publisher of The National Enquirer, who is also friends with Mr. Trump and who engaged in the practice of “catch and kill” with negative stories, meaning women who made accusations of sexual relationships with the candidate received payments or contracts with the magazine.”

Exactly-with Cohen’s clear pattern in these other cases, it makes sense to look if he had a role in trying to keep the lid on Hollywood Access as well as what communications he had with so called ‘President Trump’ regarding it.

“Perhaps equally significant for Mr. Trump was Mr. Cohen’s presence on television, particularly after the “Access Hollywood” tape, when the candidate had few defenders.”

“I have never heard Mr. Trump say anything even remotely close to the statements that I heard,” Mr. Cohen said about the tape in one appearance on CNN. “When I first heard that there was a tape that was going to be coming out, I said it’s got to be fake because — and I spend thousands of hours with Mr. Trump a year. And I can tell you I have never heard him say anything, anything even close to that.”

Ok-but he did say it, didn’t he?

As for Hannity aka Trump’s Minister of Misinformation aka his real Chief of Staff a judge released hundreds of texts in June between him and: Rudy Giuliani. 

With the recent explosion of the Ukraine if you’re listening scandal that Giuliani is such an integral part of you wonder those texts perhaps become even more interesting-particularly as Rudes actually consulted with Manafort on Trump’s attempt to rig another election.