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Cont: Breaking: Mueller Grand Jury charges filed, arrests as soon as Monday pt 2

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portlandatheist said:
Anybody that still supports the unindicted co-conspirator after 8/21/2018 has completely lost their freaking mind.
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True, but we have absolutely no idea who the unindicted co-conspirator could be. It's not like Watergate, is it where everyone knew?
 
dudalb said:
Gee, every legal expert I have heard says the payment from campaign funds to Stormy was a crime.
But keep up the denial, it's amusing.
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It's a stupifying crime. Even with a lawyer telling him not to, he insisted on cash fuelled through intermediaries. What could have been handled legally (or at least plausibly claimed as a "mistake" and corrected with a fine like everyone else) was instead handled in a manner so criminal, it's a cliche of every procedural crime drama on the air.

It is not "like other campaign violations" because Trump, as is his way, had to know better than everyone else in the room how to do it "right." Intent and forethought are present and there's more and more people lining up to corroborate that state of mind.
 
alfaniner said:
The PDJT made mention of that news during last night's rally as well. And he also managed to get in another "Wasn't that a great Election?" The speech was being show on Fox but they cut him off to start Tucker Carlson's show.
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Is that normal?

On the campaign finance topic: These tend to be trivial crimes. But when you go to certain lengths to deny it, IMO it morphs into something darker. Didn't Trump basically say he knew nothing about a payment to Stormy, then Rudy said Trump paid Stormy but not out of campaign funds (and "funneling" it through the law firm somehow helped), then Trump said he did know about it, but that Rudy wasn't up to speed, meanwhile Hannity saying "I did not know that" to Trump paying Cohen back ... normal people, even Trump supporters (by definition some of them must be normal, you can't call 40 percent of the population outliers), start to wonder why is it so darn hard to get the story straight? Rudy's law firm didn't seem to appreciate his cavalier explanation about how paying hush money is routine business as is tacking on $30K or so for a little bit of profit.

I'm surprised how resilient the Trump-Giuliani alliance is turning out to be.
 
The Big Dog said:
Nothing "novel' about it, it is based on FEC guidance developed in the Edwards matter. Cohen didn't use it because he was working on a plea deal, of course, given that he was looking at years and years in prison on the counts that had nothing to do with his former client.
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If the expense can be shown to be directly related to the election, and if there exists direct evidence proving just that, then it is a violation not to report:

Can I use remaining campaign funds to cover personal expenses?
Using campaign funds for personal use is prohibited, even when a federal candidate or officeholder is no longer seeking election to federal office. In determining whether expenses are for personal use or are legitimate campaign/officeholder expenses, the Commission uses the “Irrespective Test.” Personal use is any use of funds in a campaign account of a candidate (or former candidate) to fulfill a commitment, obligation or expense of any person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s campaign or responsibilities as a federal officeholder. 11 CFR 113.1(g). More simply put, if the expense would exist even in the absence of the candidacy or even if the officeholder were not in office, then the personal use ban applies.
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In Edwards case, due to the time frame of the payments, and the other evidence at hand, that threshold could apparently met to prove it was a campaign centered expense. In Trump's case, that threshold of evidence very well may have been exceeded.

In my non-lawyerly estimation.
 
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LSSBB said:
If the expense can be shown to be directly related to the election, and if there exists direct evidence proving just that, then it is a violation not to report:


In Edwards case, due to the time frame of the payments, and the other evidence at hand, that threshold could apparently met to prove it was a campaign centered expense. In Trump's case, that threshold of evidence very well may have been exceeded.

In my non-lawyerly estimation.
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You are citing a section on funds in a campaign account. The information and plea did not say that, and in fact clearly state that Cohen was reimbursed by the "real estate company."
 
blutoski said:
I think Ziggurat's distinction is that it wasn't embezzled from other peoples' contributions. ie: not like the Duncan Hunter situation.

It was Trump's money spent on what he was treating as a personal matter. The problem being that since the benefit and timing clearly helped his campaign, there's a strong argument that it's an undeclared campaign contribution.

As others have pointed out, in and of itself, an undeclared campaign contribution wasn't a 'crime'. Happens all the time. Lying in order to avoid correcting the error *is* a crime, and Cohen has plead guilty to that.
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it's the same old story: A cover up gets into much,much more trouble then just owning up to the intial offense.
 
It's one thing to say Cohen is lying about Trump knowing, but to deny that Cohen broke the law is just mind bogglngly stupid.
 
Ziggurat said:
The question isn't what he pled guilty to, but whether he actually is guilty. Can you honestly not envision why he might plead guilty to something he's not actually guilty of? Because it's really a no-brainer.
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I thought the question was whether the payment was a crime.

Ziggurat said:
First, if the payment wasn't a crime (and I don't believe it was, despite Cohen's plea deal), then nobody was covering up a breach of the law.

<snip>
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If it wasn't a crime then how could he plead guilty to it? Whether his guilty plea was sincere or not becomes moot if there is no crime to commit.
 
Strawberry said:
I expect there will be plenty of corroboration in among those 1 million or so documents seized by the FBI from Cohen's office.
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[tl;dr] There are.


The handwaving by Trump supporters is extraordinarily fact-challenged and stupid.

Cohen plead guilty, described what he did, where and when he did it, and that he was directed to do so in that fashion by Trump himself and for the explicit reason of influencing the election. That blows most of the arguments defending Trump, but also, as has already been pointed out, not all campaign finance laws are the same. That's akin to saying that vehicular manslaughter is 'traffic offense'. False equivalency is so useful for whataboutism.

But on your point, after Cohen plead guilty to his crimes, the judge has to ask the prosecution to summarize the evidence they would use to support the case that Cohen had indeed committed this crimes. Their answer specifically for the felony counts that implicate Trump included documents and audio recordings seized from Cohen on the April 19th raid, bank records, testimony of witnesses, text messages, other electronic messages, documents obtained from these banks, documents and records obtained from these shell companies.

To go over that again, according to Federal Prosecutors speaking in court directly to a judge, the evidence they have that supports Cohen's statements in his guilty plea to two federal felonies that directly implicate Trump includes a lot, but also recordings of phone calls between the principles involved.

Trump directed Cohen to commit felonies, according to Cohen and prosecutors backed by seemingly overwhelming evidence.
 
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