Trump finds common cause against Mueller
US president says he has come totally clear in Robert Mueller and team’s ‘Witch Hunt Report’
n Friday evening, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Justice Department team and federal prosecutors in Manhattan offered a few reasons, perhaps, for why President Donald Trump went on the Twitter warpath Friday morning – including their apparent belief that the president himself is a primary architect of some of the troubling events they have been examining.
Our day began with the president populating his social feed with accusations that Mueller (and a host of other people and nefarious forces) had “big time conflicts of interest” and was “lying and leaking” in service of drafting a “final Witch Hunt Report” about the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Kremlin to sabotage the 2016 presidential campaign.
Near the end of the day, Mueller and prosecutors with the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed three sentencing memorandums involving two prominent members of the president’s troubled advisory board — Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and self-described “fixer.”
Let’s turn first to Mueller’s ten-page, partially redacted Manafort filing, which outlines why he and his team believe that Manafort lied to them even after he decided to cooperate with their investigation in September.
They accuse Manafort of breaching the plea agreement in two ways. First, he allegedly dissembled about contacts he had with members of the Trump administration. He’s also said to have conspired with Konstantin Kilimnik — a Russian linked to his country’s intelligence network.
Trump’s name isn’t in any of the unredacted portions of the Manafort sentencing memo but his presence looms large in all of the court filings since both Manafort and Cohen worked for him. In a taste of what might still be coming, CNN reported earlier on Friday that one of the president’s ersatz lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said Mueller’s team told Manafort that Trump was lying when he said he didn’t know about a 2016 Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with a Russian attorney offering compromising information about Hillary Clinton. Manafort was present at that meeting, along with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Another thing to consider: Manafort breached his plea agreement with Mueller after being indicted for money laundering, bank fraud, tax fraud and failing to register as an agent of the Ukraine government. He was found guilty of bank and tax fraud, witness tampering, and conspiracy to defraud the US government. The money laundering and registration charges were never heard in a courtroom because he pleaded guilty to the other charges.
That is a lot of illegal and disreputable stuff, and Manafort’s plea deal likely would have spared him a meaningful chunk of prison time. Yet he lied to Mueller’s team and now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Why? I’ll venture to guess: He may be expecting a pardon from the president or he has been trying to protect third parties.
In case any of this isn’t enough to remind you of the quality of some of the advice and people who have circulated around the Trump Organisation, the Trump presidential campaign, and the White House, consider Michael Cohen.
The sentencing memorandum federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed on Friday outlined in fresh detail previously reported acts of tax and bank fraud that Cohen committed during and after his service to the president. It noted that Cohen lied to Congress about some of his actions, including the pursuit of a Trump project in Moscow that went on much longer than was previously known — and until well after it was clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee for president.
It also offered a description of Cohen’s orchestration of hush-money payments to two alleged Trump paramours — Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal — to prevent them from revealing details about their encounters with Trump during the 2016 campaign.
The Mueller team, while asking for greater lenience in Cohen’s sentencing, also dropped this fun fact in its sentencing memo: In November 2015, a Russian citizen offered Cohen “synergy on a government level” between Russia and Trump’s nascent presidential campaign. The person pushed for a meeting involving Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Cohen didn’t take up the offer, but it appears to significantly predate other previously reported overtures from Russians to Trump’s advisors or family members. Mueller’s Cohen memo also highlights Cohen’s actions and statements when he appeared before Congress and concludes that they “show a deliberate effort to use his lies as a way to set the tone and shape the course of the hearings in an effort to stymie the inquiries.”
All of this suggests, quite clearly, that federal law enforcement authorities believe that Cohen – at least when it came to paying hush money and lying about the significance and timeline of the Moscow project – was essentially Trump’s puppet. The Trump administration is having none of that, however.
On Friday evening, the White House dismissed the sentencing memos, with Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, specifically noting that the Cohen memos “tell us nothing of value that wasn’t already known.”
Trump concurred. He took to Twitter to offer the optimistic conclusion that everything filed by prosecutors today “Totally clears the President.”
Totally.
Mueller’s Cohen memo also highlights Cohen’s actions and statements when he appeared before Congress and concludes that they ‘show a deliberate effort to use his lies’