The Southern District of New York's bad faith indictment of Cohen to smear the President

Mark Levin:

1. A sitting president CANNOT be indicted. That’s official DOJ policy since 1973. Neither the Special Counsel nor the Southern District of New York (SDNY) nor Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein can defy that 45-year-old policy.

2. SDNY is NOT expert in campaign finance violations and neither is the Clinton appointed district judge. They rarely handle campaign finance cases. The left-wing media and politicians are regurgitating what the prosecutors have merely filed in their own self-serving brief. The media and others intentionally refuse to look at the actual rules and context. They refuse to even question what these prosecutors have thrown together.

3. The actual campaign rules and context do NOT include Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) or infinite other contracts, payments, arrangements, acts of a private nature, etc. as campaign contributions. This is normal human behavior and was never intended to be regulated or reported. SDNY is dead wrong. And these private payments can be made in any manner or any amount. Again, they’re private payments involving private matters. To underscore, there’s no reporting requirement because they’re not campaign payments made with or without campaign funds.

4. SDNY inclusion of these charges in the Cohen plea deal was a sleazy political and PR attack against the president by an office coordinating with Mueller and aligned with Comey. SDNY knew Cohen would plead. It, therefore, knew its absurd allegations would not be tested in any courtroom — district, circuit or Supreme Court. If they were tested, SDNY would be hammered like a nail. But it knew the left-wing media and politicians would use the mere over-the-top allegations from its office, with absolutely nothing more, to claim the president committed campaign felonies. No due process. No assumption of innocence. They knew they couldn’t charge a sitting president. Thus, they convict the president in the press, not only an extreme act of professional misconduct but a violation of the very purpose of the DOJ memos banning the indictment of a sitting president while effectively indicting him in the court of public opinion, and watch as untold numbers of media personalities and former members of the SDNY, among others, use this dirty work to predict or demand the president’s indictment and/or impeachment.
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Levin adds that conduct which occurred before a person becomes President cannot be used for impeachment.  I think paragraph 4 is the one that goes to the heart of the bad faith motives of those who brought the charges. 

By threatening Cohen with much more serious charges they in effect blackmailed Cohen into pleading guilty to something that was not a crime. 

I have noted before the MO of these investigations of the 2016 election has been to indict people associated with the Trump campaign on unrelated charges so that they could use those charges as leverage to attack the President.  It has the appearance of a bad faith effort