A Bad Day In Court
22nd August 2018
John Hinderaker at Powerline (a Real Lawyer as most DemLegHump Media chatterers are not) lays it out.
As Paul said, the Manafort charges had nothing to do with Donald Trump, nothing to do with the 2016 election, and nothing to do with Russian participation in the 2016 election. So Bob Mueller could only have brought the case in order to put pressure on Manafort to come up with some “dirt” on Mueller’s target, President Trump. As far as we know, Manafort has no dirt to give.
Meanwhile, and almost simultaneously, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pled guilty to a series of offenses. Mostly, the counts relate to tax evasion. The only politically significant counts, as I understand it, relate to Cohen’s role in paying off Stephanie Clifford (“Stormy Daniels”) to keep quiet about her sexual encounter with Trump.
It is not illegal to pay someone to remain silent. The theory here is that the money paid to Clifford was an illegal campaign contribution. Since Cohen says he made the payment to Clifford at Trump’s direction, Mueller is trying to ensnare Trump in that “crime.” To my knowledge, there is no legal authority on whether paying a woman to keep her mouth shut constitutes a campaign contribution. It strikes me as a foolish interpretation of the law, and forcing Cohen to plead guilty to the “crime” of paying off Ms. Clifford doesn’t transform it into a crime.
That’s the bottom line. Of course, in these degenerate modern times, thin air can be whipped up into a ‘crime’ depending on how the political winds blow. We’ll have to see.