Lapse of loyalty
Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison Wednesday after admitting crimes “involving the president of the United States of America,” namely paying off purported mistresses and deceiving Congress about business dealings in Russia. President Trump’s former fixer thereby completed a long journey from what he called “blind loyalty” in his onetime boss to implicating him in felonies that may have affected the election.
Cohen is no quintessence of credibility, but his account is consistent with those of federal prosecutors in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office and New York; the recipients of the hush money, pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal; and National Enquirer publisher AMI, which on Wednesday admitted conspiring with Trump’s campaign to buy and suppress McDougal’s story — a real example of “fake news” if there ever was one.
Trump hasn’t offered a response to these allegations. Rather, he’s offered a number of mutually incompatible responses: He didn’t know about the payments, or he did but they were “private” and unrelated to the campaign, or they were campaign expenses but amounted to “civil” rather than criminal transgressions — as if a presidential campaign could have just disclosed a couple of six-figure porn star payoffs and avoided the whole bureaucratic snag.
If Trump tells such stories to his lieutenants, it’s no wonder they require blind loyalty.