Manafort conviction and Cohen plea: Sound and fury signifying nothing

By Bob Livingston

Manafort conviction and Cohen plea: Sound
and fury signifying nothing 

While the conviction of Paul Manafort and the plea deal struck by Michael Cohen gave the fake news media inflated ratings and fodder with which to gin up the deluded Democrats and the #NeverTrump crowd, when boiled down to their basic elements there is nothing there to legally hurt President Donald Trump.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller treated Manafort worse than a known crime boss — raiding his home in the early morning, piling on charges and locking him away in solitary confinement while he awaited trial. Mueller threw everything at Manafort but the kitchen sink, hoping beyond hope to get him to tie Trump to some "Russian collusion." What he got was a conviction on bank fraud and money laundering for activities long before he signed onto the Trump campaign.

The activities he was convicted of occurred under Mueller's nose while he was FBI director. Manafort's partner in Ukraine — from which the charges stemmed — was one Tony Podesta, a Democrat operative who has hovered in the Bill and Hillary Clinton orbit for decades. Podesta still has not been charged with a crime, but his political organization/PR firm has gone belly up.

As the Washington Examiner's Byron York writes:

Mueller did not allege any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign, and none were revealed at the trial. That's not to say the public did not learn anything from the Manafort trial. Indeed, if nothing else, outsiders got a glimpse into what Washington influence peddlers have gotten away with for decades. Manafort was convicted of shady dealing going back a long way. His behavior had been examined by the Obama Justice Department, which took no action against him. It was only because Manafort hooked up with Trump, and Trump then won the White House, and Democrats then pushed a Trump-Russia narrative to hobble the new president, and Trump then fired the director of the FBI — only through all of those circumstances — that Manafort got caught and his foreign money schemes exposed. The importance of the financial crimes case against Manafort was never the financial crimes themselves. It was the prosecutors' hope that, by charging the hell out of the offenses alleged, by playing hardball with the defendant with a guns-drawn-at-dawn search-warrant raid, by jailing him over a debatable obstruction of justice charge that Manafort could be pressured into spilling what prosecutors apparently thought were a lot of beans about the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

But the beans weren't there, so Mueller's team turned to Cohen.

He and his hack lawyer Lanny Davis — a long-time Clinton "fixer," spokespuppet and bagman — copped a plea to campaign finance crimes. Cohen has been all over the board with this, saying months ago that payments to women claiming affairs with Trump had nothing to do with the campaign. Now he's flipped his script, which has made the political left flip its lid — again.

But even the fake news Washington Post is forced to admit that Cohen's plea probably will not have any legal consequences for the president while he is in office, according to legal analysts. The Department of Just(Us) has long held that sitting presidents can't be charged with a crime. Mueller has said that campaign finance violations are outside the scope of his mandate — that's one reason he pushed the Cohen case off on U.S. Attorneys in New York — and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has admitted that Trump can't be indicted.

And besides, if a campaign finance violation occurred, prosecutors would have to prove that Trump knew that the payments violated campaign finance laws and instructed Cohen to make them anyway.

When the Federal Election Commission ruled on the John Edwards case in 2012 – Edwards was charged with making payments to his mistress, with whom he had a son, to keep her quiet during the campaign — it found that the payments were not campaign contributions.

If anything, Trump's payments likely only amount to civil violations, not crimes, and Trump will be forced to pay a fine as Barack Obama did for not reporting campaign contributions in 2008.

As former Bill Clinton pollster Mark Penn notes, Cohen's plea involves pleading guilty to a corporate contribution he did not make (coordinating a payment to Karen McDougal by American Media, Inc.) and one that he made on October 27, 2016 — days before the election that would not have shown up on any campaign finance documents until long after the election was settled. And it was a payment Trump and Cohen had been working on for five years.

Meanwhile, none of Hillary Clinton's campaign finance documents make mention of the millions of dollars paid to the Perkins Coie law firm which laundered that money through Fusion GPS to a former British spy working with Russians to find dirt on Trump. Nor, do we note, are any Clinton operatives the targets of investigations by a special counsel or — at least so it seems — the feckless Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

While none of this implicates Trump — beyond guilt by association — it provides shiploads of ammunition for the further division of right and left and plenty of campaign implications for this fall.

And that's probably exactly what the Deep State wants.