USA TODAY International Edition
Can Trump survive latest court filings?
Explosive charges on hush money and Russia
The latest court memos filed by special counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York cast a deep shadow over Donald Trump's presidency. In cases involving former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, they disclose that the president, while a candidate, oversaw and directed a criminal scheme.
We already knew Cohen seemed to have a hand in two instances of criminal conduct. One was the campaign finance scandal involving hush money payouts to women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs. The other was the pursuit during the campaign of Trump's dream of a Trump Tower in Moscow, possibly connected to easing or removing sanctions on Russia.
The filings confirm Cohen's involvement in those two schemes but, far more important, recall the famous Watergate inquiry: What did the president know and when did he know it? The memos suggest the answers are: 1) a lot and 2) at the time.
The New York prosecutors' memo flatly portrays Trump — “Individual 1” — as the mastermind of a criminal conspiracy to break campaign finance laws to influence the election. The prosecutors say that “as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual 1.”
That is incendiary stuff. Were it not for the apparent infinite tolerance of the Republican Senate for Trump's misconduct, that charge itself would put the president in grave peril of impeachment and removal. Arguably, the memo is a baby step from the flat conclusion that the president is a felon.
The prosecutors say the hush money scheme deceived voters and robbed them of the transparency that the campaign finance laws are designed to protect. An unstated but inescapable corollary is that we can never know whether Trump stole the election.
In some ways, the more explosive charge concerns Trump's personal involvement in outreach to the Russian government from early 2015 until well into the campaign. The special counsel office's seven-page memo credited Cohen with providing “useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation,” as well as “relevant and useful information concerning his contacts with persons connected to the White House during the 2017–18 time period.” A wealth of incriminating information involving the president likely is wrapped in this careful formulation.
Mueller sketches out Cohen's long course of work in support of the Trump Tower “Moscow Project.” The building would have been the largest in Europe and the biggest deal of the dealmaker's career. Mueller informs the court that Cohen continued to work on the “highly lucrative” project and discuss it with “Individual 1” through most of the campaign. It thus exposes as lies Trump's repeated statements during the campaign. Cohen told the same lies to Congress — the offense that Mueller charged him with — and the contacts in 2017-18 refer to his likely coordination of those lies with the high reaches of the Trump White House.
I have argued that the Moscow Project could implicate Trump in a criminal conspiracy to ease sanctions on Russia in return for the green light to build the tower. But the more chilling part of the story is captured in the phrase “political synergy.” Cohen said a “trusted person” in the Russian Federation negotiating the deal offered it to the campaign. Translation: The Moscow Project will bring you great wealth and enormous political power, which you can use in ways friendly to Russia.
This, one suspects, is the enduring image of the Trump presidency, the shadow he will never remove. Trump's signature project, as candidate and president, has been his own enrichment. And a main theme of the seemingly countless false and misleading claims is to recast or conceal that goal in crass political terms that excite the minority slice of the voting public that permits his tenuous grasp on power. That grasp could finally be loosening.