The porn star, a supergrass lawyer . . . and why, this time, Donald’s house of cards really could topple
The porn star. The Bunny girl. The supergrass lawyer – and the ex-FBI chief hellbent on bringing the President down. No wonder all of America is asking . . .
IT’S the season of violent summer storms in the US when azure blue skies suddenly turn black and Americans break off from their woefully short holidays and scuttle for shelter.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump was soaked not once but twice in astonishingly quick succession as the political heavens opened in a catastrophic day for his presidency.
Two of his former stalwart lieutenants pleaded guilty to criminal charges in courtrooms 240 miles apart in a double victory for the President’s opponents, who are desperate to see similar charges laid against the occupant of the Oval Office.
First, Michael Cohen – Mr Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and a previously loyal confidant – admitted in Manhattan to various counts of tax evasion and a single count of bank fraud.
Far more seriously for the presidency, Cohen – who agreed a plea deal with prosecutors – admitted two campaign finance offences, accusing Mr Trump of ordering payments to cover up potential sex scandals. This constitutes a federal crime by violating US campaign finance laws.
Just minutes before his stunning guilty plea, a jury in Virginia considering the unrelated charges against Mr Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, delivered guilty verdicts on eight counts of financial crimes. His conviction signalled a crushing victory for the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who charged Manafort as part of his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen and Manafort face jail sentences and both may choose to try to limit their amount of time behind bars by co-operating with prosecutors who are looking for bigger fish. And there’s none bigger than Mr Trump. He and his lawyers have tried to distance him from both cases, but their efforts look increasingly farcical.
A day that ended with both the President’s fixer and his former campaign boss facing jail has been hailed as a shattering blow for the Trump administration.
Mr Trump’s claims to be the target of a witchhunt over alleged collusion with Russia are crumbling as a tide of crime and corruption washes up right to his door.
It was left to one US broadcaster to somberly remind Mr Trump of the old saying: ‘We know you by the company you keep.’
TURNCOAT LAWYER
Michael Cohen once boasted that he would ‘take a bullet’ for Mr Trump. Instead, he’s now pointing the gun at his former client.
How much ammunition he has is not clear, although he was Mr Trump’s legal attack dog and fixer for many years. If there are skeletons, he surely knows where they’re buried.
He showed he was ready to make life difficult for Mr Trump when it emerged last month that he had taped a conversation with his client in which they discussed paying off a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who claimed she’d had an affair with the future President.
Ultimately, Cohen, 51, arranged a deal whereby a tabloid magazine owned by a friend of Mr Trump agreed to buy her story but never publish it. ‘What kind of a lawyer would tape a client?’ Mr Trump complained on Twitter.
In court, Cohen admitted he’d lied repeatedly for Mr Trump but seemed intent on showing he would be honest from now on. Asked if he’d had any drugs or alcohol in the previous 24 hours, he said he’d had ‘a glass of Glenlivet 12 on the rocks’ at a dinner.
Crucially, he said he tried to ‘fix’ embarrassing claims about Mr Trump’s messy love-life by making payments to porn star Stormy Daniels ‘in co- ordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office ... for the principal purpose of influencing the election’. By the word ‘candidate’, he could only mean Mr Trump. Cohen now faces up to six years in prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance fraud, bank fraud and tax evasion.
Most worrying for Mr Trump, Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said his client was ‘more than happy’ to help the official investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
‘From this point on, you are going to see a liberated Michael Cohen speaking truth to power,’ his lawyer said.
Chillingly, he went on to say that Cohen considers Mr Trump to be ‘both corrupt and a dangerous person in the Oval Office’ and that he ‘knows almost everything about Mr Trump’. What’s more, in a radio interview yesterday, Davis called Mr Trump a ‘criminal’, saying: ‘He has not pleaded guilty to a crime but his own lawyers have described him directing somebody to do something that is a criminal act.’
For his part, in a flurry of tweets, Mr Trump accused Cohen of making up stories to get a ‘deal’.
PORN STAR’S ENCORE
Anyone who thought Stormy Daniels’s threat to Mr Trump was a one-night wonder has been proved very wrong. The fact is that the President’s lawyers have long said they’re more worried about her case than the Russia investigation. It has been independently established that Miss Daniels – real name Stephanie Clifford – received hush money over her claims she had a brief affair with Mr Trump in 2006, shortly after his wife Melania gave birth to their son, Barron.
Although Mr Trump denies ever having a relationship with her, it has emerged that Cohen paid her £101,000 in hush money.
Prosecutors said the Trump Organisation paid Cohen £325,000 to reimburse him for paying off Miss Daniels and other women, then relied on ‘sham’ invoices to hide what they were for.
Miss Daniels, who shamelessly launched a nationwide stripping tour to exploit her notoriety, reacted to Cohen’s guilty plea by saying: ‘How ya like me now?!’ She also stressed that she and her bullish lawyer, Michael Avenatti, were still gunning for Trump. ‘We. Are. Coming,’ Mr Avenatti has warned. ‘We are going to end this dumpster fire of a presidency one way or another.’
PLAYMATE WHOSE STORY WAS BURIED
Former Playboy model Karen McDougal, the other alleged Trump old flame who Cohen says he arranged to silence, is still fighting to publish her story.
She has said she ended their alleged ten-month affair because of guilt over Mr Trump being married. Although far more restrained than Miss Daniels in grabbing the limelight, she has spoken of their supposed relationship, which she says went on around the same time as Daniels (who says she only
slept with the tycoon once) was seeing him. Miss McDougal claims he showed her round Trump Tower and insensitively pointed out that his wife slept in a separate bedroom.
On Tuesday, Cohen told the court how he arranged to pay £116,000 to the publisher of the National Enquirer magazine in return for it buying her story. The man was a friend of Mr Trump and happy to ensure the tale was never published, sparing him any embarrassment, it’s claimed. The publisher and Mr Trump deny the accusation.
CROOK WITH KREMLIN CONNECTIONS
A lobbyist for some distinctly unpleasant international clients, Paul Manafort has long been seen as one of the shadiest and most unsavoury former members of Mr Trump’s cabal.
He has now been convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud. Prosecutors said he collected £ 50million in foreign bank accounts between 2010 and 2014. Much of this, funnelled through overseas shell companies, was spent on luxury goods – from Mercedes cars to an ostrich skin jacket – and properties.
His indictment made no mention of Mr Trump nor election meddling but – as with Cohen – he is widely expected to want to reduce his time behind bars by co-operating with Mr Mueller’s Russian links investigation.
In the 1980s, Manafort advised the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos on improving his image and helped the government of the Bahamas deal with allegations it was in the pay of drugtraffickers. He resigned five months into his job as Mr Trump’s campaign chairman following reports that he received more than £9.2million from the proKremlin Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort and other senior Trump campaign aides, including Donald Trump Jr and his brother- in- law Jared Kushner, notoriously met with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer who claimed to have damaging information on presidential election rival Hillary Clinton.
Manafort faces further charges in a trial due next month that is expected to reveal more details about his involvement with Russia. Aged 69, he could have to spend the rest of his life in prison as his sentence is likely be eight to 12 years.
Although Mr Trump praised Manafort yesterday as a ‘brave man’, there would be a huge public outcry if he pardoned him.
Manafort’s only alternative may be to co-operate with the Mueller investigation.
BELEAGUERED PRESIDENT
Following Manafort and Cohen appearing in court, Mr Trump challenged his accusers to find any evidence that his campaign ever colluded with Russia. He also insisted that the hush money Cohen says he paid to the two women didn’t constitute a crime.
Will the downfall of Cohen and Manafort matter to hardcore Trump supporters? ‘Will it hell,’ they would probably say.
Indeed, his loyal audience in West Virginia yesterday chanted ‘Lock her up!’ – their famous election campaign battle-cry urging that Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for wrongly using a private email server while secretary of state.
That said, there is speculation that Mr Trump’s Republican Party – facing mid-term congressional elections in November – were less keen to keep backing Mr Trump (as they have done out of cynical pragmatism to maintain power) with the stink of criminal convictions so close to him.
Mr Trump’s legal team, which has been negotiating with Mr Mueller about whether the President might be interviewed by his inquiry, points out that Cohen is a liar and that this week’s charges against him contained no accusation against Mr Trump.
When a lawyer claims he committed a crime on behalf of a client – as Cohen did – it’s usual in the US for the client to face criminal charges, too.
But legal experts generally agree that sitting presidents cannot face fa criminal charges. Of course, Mr M Trump could be impeached – sacked as President. Such a process p would, in accordance with the US Constitution, be in instigated by a majority vote in the House of Representatives if there is reason to suspect Mr Trump of ‘treason, bribery or ot other high crimes and misd misdemeanours’. Bu But while both houses of Congress are in Republican control, that’s unlikely.
SPECIAL COUNSEL IN PURSUIT
Former FBI chief Mr Mueller will feel emboldened by the Cohen and Manafort cases as he investigates whether Mr Trump and his team conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election – and whether Mr Trump tried to obstruct this investigation as President.
Adam Schiff, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, says the thought of long jail sentences facing Cohen and Manafort will ‘dramatically’ increase the chance they’ll collaborate with Mr Mueller.
Also, Mr Davis has hinted how his client might help Mr Mueller. He claimed Cohen knows whether Mr Trump was aware in advance of the computer hacking – reportedly conducted by Russia – that undermined Mrs Clinton’s presidential campaign.
He also says Cohen has knowledge of a meeting between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer offering dirt on Mrs Clinton.
Mr Mueller has demanded to see Trump Organisation business records and some believe that Mr Trump’s business past holds the key to explaining his warmth towards Putin, for he had a long history of murky ties to Russians, some of them allegedly linked to organised crime.
ABSENT FIRST LADY
Melania Trump has never addressed claims about her husband having had affairs with at least two women just after she had given birth to his son.
However, when Mr Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, claimed she accepted her husband’s denials over Stormy Daniels, the First Lady’s spokesman retorted: ‘I don’t believe Mrs Trump has ever discussed her thoughts on anything with Mr Giuliani.’
Significantly, she will make a visit in October to African countries – which he once described as ‘s***holes’.