495

So what’s next for Michael Cohen-who has been uncharitably referred to as a would be John Dean without the legal competence or sense of guilt-and who just a few months ago said he’d be willing to take a bullet for the faux ‘President’ or be pushed off a building? You know before he became mad as hell hired Lanny Davis and jointed the #Resistance-Chapter A?

According to Donny Deustch what we’ve learned through Cohen this week-the tape showing that Trump did speak to Cohen about the payment to Karen McDougal and signed off on another payment to AMI-and-through other sources-that Cohen says that he personally witnessed  Donald Jr told Illegitimate ‘President Trump’ about the #TreasonMeeting at TrumpTower beforehand is just the tip of the iceberg. 

UPDATE: This touches on a question I’ve raised in other chapters: what else does Mueller know about Cohen that isn’t currently public? If Deutsch is right does Mueller have more of the iceberg? Adam Schiff has now made it clear the Democrats are not presuming Mueller has everything. They certainly should be investigating what else is on this ‘iceberg.’

For starters was there any truth in the CNN story that still remains to be proven or disproven that Cohen saw Jr tell Sr about the Trump Tower Russia meeting.

Interesting, because according to Deutsch’s chronology-Cohen told him ‘everything about the campaign several months ago’-this would mean Cohen told him this back in April-during  a time Cohen was still acting not like John Dean but G. Gordon Liddy-who had actually told the real John Dean right after he and the rest of the Watergate burglars were arrested that if they need to shoot him walking down the street that’s ok and who did in fact refuse to cooperate and ended up doing 5 years in prison- by far the longest prison sentence among Nixon’s co-conspirators.

Now, of course, it’s clear who’s the G. Gordon Liddy-Paul Manafort.

UPDATE: With Manafort now going to prison potentially for the rest of his life, it’s clear the only thing he can be hiding is that he, Roger Stone, and Trump colluded with Russia. In McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview he offered up the bombshell that Trump gets his foreign policy advice on North Korea from Putin. What else does Putin advise him about? This certainly suggests Trump really is the Manchurian Candidate.

Though Michael Flynn is also John Dean like-actually to get technical about it, Flynn is more like Howard E. Hunt-who was most certainly not willing to take a bullet-or do hard prison time for Tricky Dick. So in Watergate 2.0, Manafort is Liddy, Flynn is Hunt, and Cohen is John Dean-though, again, Dean was a much more competent lawyer and seemed to have a genuine sense of guilt for what he did. Lanny Davis is claiming Cohen is having a John Dean like moment in terms of guilt as well but it’s not hard to see why many might be skeptical of that.

UPDATE: It’s not surprising that Cohen is such a degraded version of Dean-this is as John Oliver says Stupid Watergate-everything is worse about it than the first one, Watergate was the tragedy, Watergate 2.0 is a farce.

But, be that as it may, what matters at the end of the day is does Cohen have the goods? It seems pretty clear that he does. So how much is he really willing to spill? It wasn’t so hard to talk about the #TreasonMeeting as he wasn’t an active participant in that particular scheme. But what about that boondoggle he and Felix Sater worked on to get a Trump Moscow built in the middle of the election? What about the faux ‘peace plan’ he and Sater collaborated on with the Russians and the UAE?

Cohen and Sater-who hung out as teenagers right here on Long Island-brought this ‘peace plan’-it was actually a total give away to Russia-to Michael Flynn. 

“Sater, Cohen, and Ukrainian politician Andrey Artemenko conspire to bring Flynn a plan to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia in exchange for Russia’s conditional retreat from, and recognition of Ukraine’s ownership of, Crimea.”

So what is he willing to tell Mueller about that now? Time will tell. Indeed as Greg Sargent notes, if Cohen really wants to deliver the goods on Trump/Russia there is a great deal he can tell us about. 

But beyond this, if Cohen is really willing to start talking a lot more about Trump’s relationship with Russia, that could prove significant in other ways.

As I just noted above he can tell us all about his and Sater’s plans on TrumpTower Moscow and the fake peace plan.

UPDATE: Cohen is now going to prison for three years and one thing he was charged with was lying about when they stopped pursuing the Trump Tower Moscow deal.

And he can tell us now if he really went to Prague or not.

As you’ll recall, McClatchy reported back in April that Mueller has evidence that Cohen secretly traveled to Prague in the summer of 2016. Cohen has adamantly denied this, but if it were true, it would lend support to the claim in the so-called Steele dossier, which reported on extensive Trump-Russia ties, that this meeting did happen. The reason this matters: The Steele dossier claimed Cohen held this meeting in Prague with Russian officials, to strategize over how to limit the “damage” from, among other things, Trump adviser Carter Page’s meetings with Russians, and more broadly, to “prevent the full details of TRUMP’s relationship with Russia being exposed.”

When the dossier first came out Cohen had seized on this claim as self evidently absurd and released a copy of his passport that didn’t really conclusively verify anything either way-it didn’t show a stamp of him visiting Prague in the late August-early September 2016 time period but this might have been for any number of reasons–perhaps because he travelled through Germany to the Czech Republic and so wouldn’t have needed a passportf. He had filed a lawsuit against Buzzfeed for publishing the Steele dossier in early January, 2017.

But he dropped the lawsuit in April after as Sargent noted above the report that Mueller did have evidence that Cohen did travel to Prague. 

So what is he saying about visiting Prague these days? His statement that he observed Don Jr tell the faux ‘President’  firsthand about the #TreasonMeeting directly contradicts what he told two different Congressional committees. 

Will he now contradict what he said about never visiting Prague and give us the real, full story on TrumpTower Moscow and the fake Ukrainian ‘peace plan?’ It depends on what his true motivations are. If he wants a deal with Mueller-and in my mind that scenario is the most likely of the three scenarios out there then he will have to.

Obviously, if Cohen is telling the truth now he was lying when he testified before Congress. It also means that Don Jr. was lying which logically means he could be facing perjury charges. 

“If Michael Cohen can show federal prosecutors credible evidence that President Donald Trump knew in advance about the infamous Trump Tower Russia meeting of June 9, 2016 — as Cohen now reportedly claims — the President’s son could be facing perjury charges.”

“In extensive testimony under oath before the committee in September 2017, the following exchange occurred:

Patrick Davis, deputy chief investigative counsel: “Did you inform your father about the meeting or the underlying offer prior to the meeting?”

Donald Trump Jr.: “No, I did not.”

Cohen is now directly contradicting him so one of them is lying. Beyond that there is the question of the blocked calls Jr. made just before and after the #TreasonMeeting at TrumpTower. 

Don Jr: Democrats have suggested that three phone calls Trump Jr. placed to blocked telephone numbers before and after the meeting could have been to his father, but Trump Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that he couldn’t recall. “So you don’t know whether or not this might have been your father?” congressional investigators asked during his interview, according to the transcript released by the committee earlier this year. “I don’t,” Trump Jr. responded.

UPDATE: The Democrats who will take over the House tomorrow-can’t wait-have vowed to find out whose blocked number that was.

UPDATE 2.0: Richard Burr the GOP Chairman Senate Intelligence Committee recently asserted it wasn’t his father-though all we have is a GOP Chairman who was part of the Trump campaign and transition and who recently declared his investigation has found ‘no evidence of collusion’-during the campaign Burr actually said Hillary Clinton should be shot.

While comparatively professional-Devin Nunes and friends offered a particularly low bar-it is notable that the only issue Burr has been willing to speak publicly is that the phone call wasn’t Trump Sr”s. In any case the investigation was behind closed doors and therefore totally inadequate.

End of UPDATES:

So not a denial. Perhaps he claimed not to remember so as not to perjure himself by saying categorically it was not to his father-ie, he went to the Ollie North-Ronald Reagan playbook. While he  did perjure himself, if Cohen is to be believed, regarding speaking to his father before the meeting here he chose to . be cautious. Of course, saying you don’t remember when you do is also perjury.

In order to get to the bottom of this, the Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee want Jr to come back and testify-this time publicly. 

“Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are calling on Donald Trump Jr. to reappear before the committee and testify—this time in public.”

Very good-it must be public. If you want to know why Trump’s approval rating today is 40% rather than 30% or 20% it’s because the GOP has conducted the entire investigation in the dark-in addition the House GOP shut it down way prematurely in February and declared ‘no evidence of collusion’ when they didn’t look for the evidence-they didn’t even speak to George Papadopoulos whose knowledge of the damaging emails Russia allegedly had on Clinton begun the Russia probe in the first place.

UPDATE: HSPCI Democrat Jackie Spier has vowed that the first witness Dems want to subpoena is Donald Jr. 

FN: The Congresswoman has a fascinating-and shocking story. 

For someone who was once a prisoner of the Jonestown cult, a ‘conspiracy theory’ like Russia collusion probably doesn’t seem so outlandish.

 

Back to Newsweek:

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont says Cohen’s claims “raise important questions,” according to NBC News. “It’s time for Donald Trump Jr. to come back before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer them, but this time in public, under oath,” Leahy said.

“In an email to Newsweek, Tom Mentzer, communications director for Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, noted a statement from her that said if recent reports were true, “it would suggest that Donald Trump Jr. may have misled Judiciary Committee staff about the meeting when he was interviewed last fall. It further demonstrates the need to bring him before the committee to answer our questions.”

Mentzer also cited a letter sent in February by Senate Democrats to Chuck Grassley, the committee’s Republican chairman, saying that “Feinstein and other committee members have called multiple times for Donald Trump Jr. to appear before the committee.”

So what do the 11 GOPers on the Committee-who, unfortunately, run the committee have to say?

“Newsweek could not reach any of the 11 Republican members of the Judiciary Committee about whether they would support having Donald Trump Jr. re-testify.”

Wow-I didn’t see that coming. But as is clear, while the GOP runs Congress it seems not to understand that it has these amazing powers of a thing called oversight.

UPDATE: The good news is Lieu, Nadler, and friends now run the House Judiciary.

UPDATE: While Dem oversight was kind of slow in starting during the first 7 months-up until Mueller’s-very reticent, understated testimony-it’s gotten into high gear since the revelations about the Ukraine phone call.

End of UPDATE 2,

Beyond this, a few other points to rundown. As to who leaked we’re still in the ‘It wasn’t me it was them’ stage. Lanny Davis is very clear it wasn’t the Cohen side and asserts it must have been the Trump side while Giuliani claims he just heard about it for the first time three minutes before it broke. This kind of reminds you of Trump claiming not to know about the Trump Tower #TreasonMeeting until after the story broke in June, 2017.

As to who it helps or hurts there is a lot of speculation. It seems from what you hear that it likely doesn’t endear Cohen to Mueller-assuming Cohen is behind the leak and maybe the Team #TreasonTrump thinks this is a way to lower Cohen’s value and get him on Mueller’s bad side. But legal analysts also seem pretty clear that this won’t lower his value as a witness-after all you can know something yet the prosecution still will usually want an eyewitness account.

Then there is a certain zombie idea out there that  Team #TreasonTrump is somehow exonerated by the claim-that is not verifiable based on public knowledge; who wants to take the word of Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner on faith?-that they didn’t actually receive the anticipated Clinton dirt?

This is an argument I’ve never understood. After all, isn’t intent the big piece in inculpatory evidence? I mean if I go out to buy some primo cocaine is it a defense to testify that I didn’t like the quality when I saw it? If Team #TreasonTrump didn’t get the Clinton oppo from the meeting it wasn’t from lack of desire. It’s sort of like attempted murder-if someone tries to poison you and they aren’t successful that doesn’t mean they’re off scot free.

UPDATE: Normally intent is a big part of it but this didn’t seem to hold in Mueller’s declination decision regarding Jr and the Trump Tower Russia meeting.

Beyond that, it’s not so clear they didn’t get the dirt. Based on the timeline, there’s the question of wether this meeting  overlapped with the DCLeaks hacks. 

“Sam Nunberg, a Republican operative who worked on Trump’s campaign in its early stages, said he thinks it’s likely Trump was told about the meeting beforehand primarily because of his prior relationship with the Russian billionaire who proposed it to begin with—Agalarov. Trump first met Agalarov in 2013 in Las Vegas, where they discussed bringing Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow and holding it at a mall complex Agalarov owned on the outskirts of the city. But Nunberg said he still believes that the meeting “was ultimately harmless” because “there was no discussion about Clinton’s emails.” Veselnitskaya “exploited that relationship to get a meeting on her niche issue,” Nunberg said.

Nunberg as noted yesterday, agrees with Bannon’s analysis and corroborates Cohen’s allegation-that Don Jr must have told his Dad. But then he goes to the canard that they’re in the clear as the emails didn’t come up; which makes no sense as dirt on Clinton was promised in the emails proposing the meeting from Rob Goldstone.

UPDATE: In a bizarre reversal, Nunberg claimed in the aftermath of the alleged Cohen allegation that he now believes Trump’s denials-he says what changes is learning Cohen-who was supposedly his friend-was taping the conversations:

Nunberg said he believed Trump’s denials of knowing anything about the meeting in advance.

In March, Nunberg scoffed at such a denial and suggested Trump knew about the meeting “a week before” it took place.”

“During an interview on NBC News’ “Meet The Press,” Nunberg said Sunday that he believed Trump over Cohen, though he never discussed the claims with Cohen.

“If Michael Cohen says now he knew about the Russia meeting in advance, I would believe Don Jr. and the president in light of learning Michael was taping conversations,” Nunberg told the show’s host, Chuck Todd.

Huh? This makes no sense as a logical inference.

Just goes to show-you can’t believe anything the Trump co-conspirators say-we’ve seen this again and again with all of them-Flynn, Cohen, Manafort… Nunberg.

Back to Natasha Bertrand:

“Still, if Trump approved a meeting with foreign nationals in the hopes of obtaining something of value—i.e., opposition research at the height of the presidential election—the intent alone could provide prosecutors with an important piece in understanding the campaign’s willingness to conspire with Russia, legal experts told me.”

There you go-intent alone could be enough.

“It’s certainly one of the more relevant data points that we’ve had,” said the former federal prosecutor Jeff Cramer. If Trump approved the meeting, it was “clearly a violation of criminal law”—specifically, the campaign-finance laws that prohibit campaigns from soliciting things of value from foreign nationals. “And it gives color to all the cover-ups,” Cramer said.  Trump and his surrogates have denied that the president knew about the meeting approximately 20 times over the last year. Trump also personally dictated a misleading statement about the meeting on his son’s behalf, which left out the fact that the Russians had offered the campaign dirt on Clinton.

“Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and a former special counsel to then–Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller, said that if prosecutors “could establish that Trump approved the meeting with foreign nationals to receive derogatory information about his opponent—a thing of value—it would fall squarely within the black letter of campaign-finance laws. It would be difficult to dispute that the campaign received a thing of value when the candidate knew of the purpose and approved of the meeting.”

Then there is the bigger picture-in terms of time, the meeting closely correlated with the set up of the DC Leaks website. The meeting may well be a piece of the puzzle of a ‘larger mosaic.’

“It also could be “one tile in the larger mosaic” of the alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cramer noted, given the discussion of sanctions at the Trump Tower meeting and Russia’s subsequent efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign through hacks and disinformation. “Did the meeting overlap somehow with the Russian hacking? These could have been separate events within the same criminal conspiracy,” Cramer said. Just one day before the Trump Tower meeting, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, set up a website called DCLeaks with the purpose of disseminating Democrats’ stolen emails, according to court documents filed by Mueller earlier this month. Mueller  revealed in those same court filings that Russian hackers began trying to access Clinton staffers’ emails just hours after Trump asked them to. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said in public remarks in July 2016, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from her private server that she’d said were private in nature. It is also worth remembering that, two months before the Trump Tower meeting occurred, a Russia-linked national offered a junior campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, dirt on Clinton from Russia in the form of thousands of stolen emails.”

UPDATE: Note that in Cohen’s sentencing memorandum it’s now revealed that they only stopped pursuing the Trump Tower Moscow deal after news of the DNC hack broke as we see in (Chapter A).

UPDATE 2. Regarding the aftermath of Russia, if  you’re listening the Mueller Report revealed that not only did the hackers attempt to hack Clinton’s office the same day but Trump also directed Michael Flynn to find Cinton’s deleted emails that same day-Flynn appears to have followed Trump’s directive in working with the late Peter Smith on his project to pay Russian hackers to obtain her emails.

End of UPDATE 2.

I love that one tile in a larger mosaic. The huge, absolutely gargantuan mosaic that is Russian interference and quite possible collusion has been getting a lot of new tiles lately. No doubt Cohen’s got a lot more ‘stories to tell’ that will serve as many more tiles.

UPDATE: While Lanny Davis had implied Cohen had firsthand knowledge of wether Trump colluded, he later pulled back on that and insists that Cohen didn’t got to Prague. But we do know that even in August, 2018, Cohen was not fully forthcoming with investigators. Again, if Cohen went to neither Prague or another similar former Soviet satellite late in the Summer of 2016 regarding the hackers why did he withdraw his lawsuit against Buzzfeed after news came that asserted Mueller did have evidence Cohen went to Prague?

 

So at this point Cohen gave Mueller the full story regarding Trump Tower Moscow but is at least publicly still denying having gone to Prague. As for the faux peace plan-Mueller says nothing about that in Cohen’s sentencing memorandum either.

 

Many have now simply presumed he didn’t based on him still denying it now and no public evidence yet coming coming to light showing he did-of course, it’s a truism that evidence of absence is not absence of evidence.

Obviously one explanation is that: Cohen never went to Prague. The trouble is that after categorically denying it and taking out a lawsuit against Buzzfeed for publishing the claim, Cohen suddenly withdrew his lawsuit very soon after the news broke that Mueller may have evidence he was in Prague during the late Summer of 2016. 

If he categorically didn’t go to Prague-or any other former Soviet satellites in late August-early September, 2016 then why did he drop his lawsuit precisely after this news came out? It seems very unlikely that he didn’t drop the lawsuit in response to the news that Mueller potentially had such evidence.

And what about this alleged evidence? I suppose that many in the MSM will just presume there was nothing to it as there has been no subsequent reporting on it. But note that by design Mueller would rather us not know if he has such evidence until he’s ready to reveal it for himself.

Which again underscores the fact that you can’t presume that the only things Mueller has learned from Cohen are what’s in the memo. There is a clear reference to ‘other Russia related matters.’

But this whole issue of Prague and the larger dossier-particularly in light of the news that Cohen’s cell was detected close to Prague in the relevant period  have led me to write a new chapter on both. See the next chapter, Chapter A.

UPDATE: Did I ever write said chapter?

UPDATE: Ok as I have discussed elsewhere I’ve since concluded that EmptyWheel’s skepticism of the  Dossier’s story of Cohen’s role in collusion is probably correct. Regarding Davis he was likely simply referring to Cohen’s strong belief-he admits he’s not certain-that he overheard Don Jr tell Don Sr in advance about the Trump Tower Russia meeting of June, 2*16.

In addition Davis was also quite possibly referring to Cohen’s assertion which he told Mueller and later testified to before Congress that he overheard Roger Stone give Trump advance knowledge of the coming DNC email dump on July 18 or July 19.

While Cohen was an important point person on the quid pro quo side it seems he wasn’t in on the collusion side. Marcy Wheeler has argued that the Russians inserted some misinformation into Steele’s Dossier; this certainly seems to be true regarding the claims the Dossier makes about Cohen’s role-it portrays him as the arch villain of collusion when it’s clear from Mueller’s subsequent court fillings and then his report that  if you can choose one particular quarterback for collusion in the Trump campaign it was Manafort; then there’s  the late Peter Smith who really did pay Russian hackers.

Again, Cohen was integral in the Quid Pro Quo side-what Russia gets in exchange for colluding with the Trump campaign-his work on Trump Tower Moscow and later on the Ukrainian ‘peace plan’-actually a give away to Russia.

To be sure,, Manafort was also integral to the Quid Pro Quo side-on his August 2, 2*16 meeting with the Russian intel operative he also discussed Russian sanctions. This Quid Pro Quo work appears even more important and central today with the breaking Ukraine if you’re listening scandal.

As Mueller revealed in his July 23, 2*19 testimony the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the central question of wether Trump is a national security threat continues. Certainly Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine into investigating  Biden in exchange for letting them have the military aid Congress had already voted to given them-on top of Trump’s disastrous pullout in Syria-ought to remove all doubt of the answer to the question: Is he a national security threat? Hell yes. He’s the biggest threat our country faces today.

 

 

 

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