Either Trump is truly ignorant enough to think that the sentencing memos released on Friday in the Cohen and Manafort cases truly exonerate him, or he is really hoping his supporters are stupid enough to believe that’s true. It’s not.
Cohen’s sentencing memo proved that Trump instructed Cohen to contact Russian government officials who offered “political synergy” (which is nothing more than a synonym for “collusion”). While Cohen says he did not follow-up on that offer, that does not mean there was no follow-up to that offer, just that Cohen didn’t follow up.
Manafort’s sentencing memo, on the other hand, is still too heavily redacted to know exactly what Mueller has uncovered regarding the allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russian government operatives. It does indicate, however, that the investigation is ongoing and that he has evidence that no one but his team of prosecutors has seen at this point. Despite Trump’s Friday night tweet insisting that the documents “totally clear” him, that is far from the truth.
In fact, those documents implicate the president in two felonies, both of which involve campaign finance violations regarding the unreported contributions made by Michael Cohen, which he was directed to commit by the then-presidential candidate, in paying off two of Trump’s alleged former mistresses.
Collusion, at this point, is neither proven nor disproven, but the slow release of information that has come out so far are pointing more and more toward indicating that the allegation is true.
Twitter had to laugh at Trump’s attempts to gaslight Americans. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
