The case against Cohen on campaign finance charges looks like an unethical sham on the part of the prosecutors

Mark Penn:
I’m experiencing 1998 déjà vu as prosecutors once again work overtime to turn extramarital affairs and the efforts to keep them secret into impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors. Unable to get the witnesses to compose the stories they want, today’s prosecutors are discovering they can simply compose the crimes by manipulating the pleas of men desperate to protect their families.

The Michael Cohen sentencing memo took aim directly at both Cohen and President Donald Trump. It was used, unethically, to cast the president as directing a criminal conspiracy to make “secret and illegal” payments. Sentencing memos are not supposed to use secret grand jury info to point fingers at those who are not being sentenced, but that’s exactly what these did.

One can say today that these New York prosecutors, acolytes of fired U.S. District Attorney Preet Bharra, have learned that the “plea’s the thing wherein to catch the king.” First, they went after the man, not the crime, and turned up millions in unpaid taxes and some bank-loan misrepresentations by Cohen. At that point, they convinced him to cave for the sake of his family; the trick was to get him to plead guilty to supposedly two campaign finance “felonies,” and then vaguely implicate the president as directing them (which Trump denies).

Despite promises to the contrary from prosecutors, they threw their star witness off the bus anyway, making him the biggest chump in this drama after he hired attorney Lanny Davis and burned all his bridges with his former client. Once they had the guilty pleas in hand, the prosecutors no longer needed Cohen; they trashed him as a greedy liar and called for substantial jail time.

The reason these two guilty pleas were so valuable is that these prosecutors could not, in my opinion, have gotten them in court. The first payment was not even made by Cohen but by American Media Inc., a bona fide media company with First Amendment protections; it could have decided to use the story that it bought, hold the story, or just prevent some competitor from using the story.

News outlets often hold stories on candidates they like and run stories instead against candidates they don’t like. If such decisions are to be campaign contributions, then every arrangement with any witnesses against or for candidates would have to be scrutinized. Was NBC’s withholding of the Billy Bush tape on Trump a campaign contribution to him? Was the illegal leak of that tape to another media organization a contribution to the Hillary Clinton campaign? Is an offer of $10,000 to women to come forward with stories against Trump now a Clinton campaign contribution? You can see why those in the media companies received immunity and were in no real danger, while the prosecutors used Cohen as their piñata once they had him on tax evasion. The Stormy Daniels payment was made by Cohen, but so late that it never would have been reportable before the election anyway, a fact prosecutors omit.

The 2016 presidential campaign involved more than $2 billion of contributions, and the usual course is for the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) and its auditors to adjudicate issues like this administratively. The last Obama campaign had millions of dollars of misreported information and paid a fine, as is typical.

Let’s also remember that the Steele dossier was at least partially paid for by a Democratic National Committee law firm that reportedly was used as a cut-out on the FEC forms. And it is settled law that the ultimate recipient, not an intermediary, must be disclosed in such cases along with the proper use category. Yet, this complaint has wended its way slowly through the FEC. The law firm has not been raided by prosecutors, lawyer confidentiality has not been broken under the grounds that “oppo” research is not legal work. No one is pleading guilty to felonies.

What revelation would have had greater impact on transparency in the election — that Democrats had paid a British spy to gather dirt on Trump from Russia, or that Trump had a consensual one-night affair?
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The FEC has already determined that payments like those Trump made were not campaign expenses.  The prosecutors had to know that and they went ahead with the bogus charges anyway because they had Cohen in the ringer and they wanted to squeeze this out of him instead of charge him with the crimes he actually allegedly committed.  If he had a better lawyer representing him rather than a Democrat consultant who appears to be more interested in smearing Trump than protecting his client the results would likely be challenged and thrown out in court.  Something smells rotten in the Southern District of New York US Attorney's office.  This looks like another Enron fiasco by a corrupt DOJ.

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