President Donald Trump is a documented habitual liar. This week, after denials of involvement in an illegal hush money scheme to silence women with whom he’d had affairs, federal prosecutors in New York confirmed that his former lawyer Michael Cohen made the payments at his direction — although they didn’t use his name, instead referring to “Individual 1.” It’s the first time any prosecutors anywhere have formally implicated President Trump, although Cohen had previously done so when he pleaded guilty to the associated campaign finance law violations earlier this year.
The major points of the scheme he engaged in with Trump are at this point well documented. In the months before the election, after a considerable period of previous negotiation over the issue, the Trump aligned American Media Inc. bought the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story of an affair with the eventual president. They never published the story — and McDougal eventually got the rights back after the whole scandal burst into the open this year.
After AMI refused to pick up adult film star Stormy Daniels’ similar story on account of her profession, Cohen stepped in. He took out a home equity loan to come up with the $130,000 and was eventually repaid by the Trump Organization via a monthly series of retainer payments.
In the time since, Trump has sought to completely disconnect himself from Cohen and the hush money ordeal at large, but it won’t be that easy for him. Federal prosecutors with the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office have now formally implicated him in a scheme to skirt campaign finance laws in order to try and buoy his campaign against allegations of sexual impropriety.
Still, Trump keeps at his nonsense.
After the latest round of filings dropped this Friday, he tweeted a triumphant declaration that the developments completely cleared him although they most certainly do not. He simply prefers to strike out on his own completely disconnected from reality.
He has previously dismissed Cohen as a liar, sharpening his criticism after an agreement for the lawyer to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation became public — but apparently he’s not lying, considering the latest federal court filings against him. In the same documents, prosecutors recommended he be sent to prison for around four years.
Trump has also got the Russia investigation itself to worry about — Mueller’s team revealed this week that the Trump camp was in contact with Russia as early as 2015. Cohen spoke with an unnamed Russian government official in November of that year who offered the campaign “synergy on a government level” with the Kremlin.
Prosecutors have previously revealed that Cohen worked on a project months after he’d claimed it ended to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that was so intertwined with the nation’s governmental affairs that Vladimir Putin was going to get a penthouse.
The president unsurprisingly dismissed the significance of that revelation too, claiming the efforts had been “very legal and very cool.”
Calling something cool isn’t exactly a solid legal defense strategy.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
