The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals of Trump meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment.
The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations.
There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual plea - Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign violation for having "Coordinated" the American Media Inc. payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment.
What's clear in this plea deal is that, in exchange for overall leniency on his massive tax evasion, Cohen is pleading guilty to these other charges as an attempt to give prosecutors what they want - a Trump connection.
With Cohen pleading guilty, there will be no test of soundness of the prosecution theories here, and it is yet another example of the double standards of justice of one investigation that gave Clinton aides and principals every benefit of the doubt and another investigation that targeted Trump people until they found unrelated crimes to use as leverage.
Prosecutors thought nothing of using the Logan Act against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and, now, obscure and unsettled elements of campaign finance law against Trump lawyer Cohen to manufacture crimes in what is a naked attempt to take Trump down and defeat democracy.
These investigations, essentially based on an opposition-funded dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down.
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/402959-cohens-plea-deal-is-prosecutors-attempt-to-set-up-trump
The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign violations that were not campaign violations.
There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual plea - Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign violation for having "Coordinated" the American Media Inc. payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment.
What's clear in this plea deal is that, in exchange for overall leniency on his massive tax evasion, Cohen is pleading guilty to these other charges as an attempt to give prosecutors what they want - a Trump connection.
With Cohen pleading guilty, there will be no test of soundness of the prosecution theories here, and it is yet another example of the double standards of justice of one investigation that gave Clinton aides and principals every benefit of the doubt and another investigation that targeted Trump people until they found unrelated crimes to use as leverage.
Prosecutors thought nothing of using the Logan Act against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and, now, obscure and unsettled elements of campaign finance law against Trump lawyer Cohen to manufacture crimes in what is a naked attempt to take Trump down and defeat democracy.
These investigations, essentially based on an opposition-funded dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down.
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/402959-cohens-plea-deal-is-prosecutors-attempt-to-set-up-trump
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