Fall the president’s men
Convicted Trump associates face prison time as Manafort guilty of fraud, and ‘fixer’ Cohen implicates president in hush-money deals
WASHINGTON— Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman: guilty and facing prison time. Donald Trump’s former lawyer: guilty, facing prison time, and implicating the president himself.
The stain of criminality surrounding the Trump presidency widened on Tuesday with momentous back-toback convictions of top officials from his business and his campaign, one of whom became the first former associate to formally accuse the president of involvement in criminal acts.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and “fix-it guy” for more than a decade, pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes. Cohen said he committed two campaign finance violations involving hush-money payments to women who claim they had sex with the married president — and he said he did it “in co-ordination” with and “at the direction of” Trump.
Minutes later, Paul Manafort, who ran Trump’s campaign for three months in 2016, was found guilty on eight of 18 charges in a separate legal proceeding: tax fraud, bank fraud and hiding a bank account. The jury said it could not reach averdict on the other10 charges, but the convictions were sufficient to possibly put Manafort in prison for the rest of his life even if he is acquitted at a separate trial next month.
The unprecedented developments occurred almost simultaneously over the course of about 20 minutes. They represent a deep and personal blow to a president who campaigned on a prom- ise to “drain the swamp” but has now seen three of his former senior officials admit to crimes and another convicted by a jury.
Trump could face legal or political peril over the payments Cohen claims Trump co-ordinated with him and directed. At the very least, Cohen’s claim will renew public questions about Trump’s role in the payments, of which he initially denied any knowledge, and about his relationships with recipients Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, with whom he has denied having had sexual relations.
Daniels, a porn actress whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, received $130,000 (U.S.) from Cohen in October 2016, a month before the presidential election. She said the payment was meant to buy her silence. McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims she had a months-long affair with Trump, received $150,000 in August 2016 from the company that owns the National Enquirer tabloid, whose chairman is a friend of Trump’s.
“Today (Cohen) stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said on Twitter. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”
Cohen, who was an executive vice-president at the Trump Organization and deputy finance chairman for the Trump-era Republican National Committee, is by far the closest Trump associate to plead guilty to charges that emerged from the special counsel probe into the 2016 campaign’s relationship with the Russian government. While Cohen was not employed by either the Trump campaign or the White House, he is widely believed to know more about Trump’s activities than former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates, who previously pleaded guilty and agreed to co-operate with prosecutors.
Unlike Flynn and Gates, Cohen’s plea does not specify that he must co-operate. He can, however, choose to do so in exchange for a possible future improvement in his sentence, which his current agreement suggests will result in up to five years in prison.
Legal experts said it was unlikely Trump himself would be charged while in office, since Justice Department guidance holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted. “But it could be the basis for an impeachment, and even if he is neither indicted nor impeached, that does not mean he did not commit a crime. If Cohen’s story is corroborated, Trump did so,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a promi- nent expert on election law, in an email.
The convictions are major victories for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which Trump has called a “witch hunt” and says should be terminated. Manafort’s convictions are the first Mueller has secured through a jury trial.
Trump ignored reporters’ questions about Cohen as he arrived in West Virginia for a campaign rally. He called Manafort’s convictions “very sad,” saying that the charges were unrelated to him and had “nothing to do with Russian collusion.” Trump did not mention Manafort, Cohen or Mueller in the 75-minute rally speech. He briefly challenged investigators to “find some collusion,” then pivoted back to the subject of illegal immigration.
Manafort, 69, spent years as a top Washington lobbyist for undemocratic foreign leaders, and his appointment by Trump raised eyebrows even at the time. He was found guilty of five counts of filing false tax returns related to millions of dollars he made advising a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine; two counts of bank fraud over false statements he made to obtain loans’ and one count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account.
Manafort faces another trial, in Washington, D.C., in September, on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, witness tampering, and failing to register as an agent of Ukraine. As with the first trial in Alexandria, Va., the next batch of charges are not about his conduct while on the Trump campaign.
Cohen’s statement implicating Trump represented a dramatic turnabout: he described himself last year as “the guy who would take a bullet for the president.” Cohen’s generic titles at Trump’s company do not fully explain his former role: diehard loyalist willing to do the dirty work to extricate Trump from sensitive problems.
“If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” Cohen said in 2011. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”
Cohen also pleaded guilty to five counts of tax evasion and one count of making a false statement to a financial institution.