Excerpt: Even if Trump were to succeed in getting rid of Mueller—which would be sure to provoke an enormous political backlash, and maybe even impeachment proceedings in Congress—the New York investigation, which is centered on Cohen, would continue. And that means Trump has more than Mueller and Russia to worry about.
"Donald Trump Has Good Reason to Be Rattled About the Michael Cohen Raid"
"Donald Trump Has Good Reason to Be Rattled About the Michael Cohen Raid"
The New Yorker
Donald Trump has again been venting his fury, following the F.B.I.’s raid of the office and hotel room of Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer and fixer. “Attorney-client privilege is dead,” the President wrote in an early-morning tweet on Tuesday. In another—an all-caps blast—he blared, “A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!”
On Twitter, at least, the President didn’t mention the possibility of firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel, as he did during his rant to the press on Monday. (My colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote about Trump’s initial reaction to the raid.) It's pretty clear, though, that such an option is very much on his mind. “He takes the Russia stuff as a political hit job,” one insider told Axios. “This was a personal affront. This was the red line of intrusion into personal financial matters.”
In July of last year, Trump told the Times that, if Mueller started looking into his finances in ways that didn’t relate to Russia, he would regard it as a violation of the special counsel’s mandate. On Tuesday afternoon, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, suggested that Trump had the power to get rid of Mueller without going through the Justice Department. Pressed on this claim, she said, “We have been advised that the President certainly has the power to make that decision. I can’t go anything beyond that."
Things aren’t so straightforward, however. Many independent legal experts believe that Trump would have to order Rod Rosenstein, the deputy Attorney General, who is overseeing the Russia investigation, to terminate Mueller. If Rosenstein refused, Trump would have to fire him and then proceed down the chain of command at the Department of Justice until he found someone willing to carry out the order.
At this point, dismissing Mueller wouldn’t end the investigations encircling the President anyway. Monday’s raid wasn’t carried out by the special counsel but, rather, by agents working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. With all the focus on Mueller, and whether Trump will try to fire him, this fact hasn’t received sufficient stress. Even if Trump were to succeed in getting rid of Mueller—which would be sure to provoke an enormous political backlash, and maybe even impeachment proceedings in Congress—the New York investigation, which is centered on Cohen, would continue. And that means Trump has more than Mueller and Russia to worry about.
According to initial reports that came out on Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York is investigating Cohen for possible bank fraud, and it’s also looking into the preëlection payoff he made to Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who claims to have had a sexual liaison with Trump at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2006. On Tuesday, the Times added a new detail, reporting that the authorities are also interested in another preëlection payment, which the publisher of the National Inquirer made to a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal. The feds “were looking for records about payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr. Trump, and information related to the publisher of The National Enquirer’s role in silencing one of the women,” the Times report said. (David Pecker, the chief executive of the National Inquirer’sparent company, is a close friend of Trump.)
Paying off people with embarrassing stories to tell isn’t, in itself, illegal. Cohen has repeatedly said that he gave Daniels a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in hush money, using his own cash. Last week, Trump told the White House press pool that he wasn't aware of the payment at the time it was made. At this stage, we don’t know if the New York investigators have any evidence to suggest that Cohen violated the law, or that Trump might also be implicated. But there are several reasons to believe that the investigation into Cohen is serious. First, it has been widely reported that it was Mueller, whose team has had extensive dealings with Cohen and subpoenaed countless documents, who referred the matter to New York investigators.
Second, judges don’t lightly grant prosecutors the authority to raid the office of an attorney. When the object of the application for a search warrant is an attorney who has worked for the President, it is fair to presume that the prosecutors presented the court with strong evidence of probable wrongdoing, or maybe even something stronger.
“There is no way—no sliver of a chance of a way—that the SDNY”—the Southern District of New York—“went to a magistrate for a search warrant against the lawyer for the President of the United States without much more than probable cause,” Benjamin Wittes, the editor of the Lawfare blog, wrote on Twitter. He went on, “You can thus assume there was A LOT of evidence in that warrant application. You can also assume the magistrate in question reviewed it carefully.”
Third, while attorney-client privilege shields many forms of communication between a lawyer and his or her client, it doesn’t shield everything. One communication that isn’t privileged is anything related to possible collusion between the lawyer and the client to break the law. “If the FBI seized evidence showing that Trump directed Cohen’s payment to Daniels, Trump may also have committed a felony violation of campaign finance law,” Norman Eisen, Noah Bookbinder, and Conor Shaw wrote at Politico. “If Cohen and Trump worked together to come up with the scheme, they might also both be guilty of conspiring to commit a campaign finance violation.”
It should be noted that Eisen, a former ethics lawyer in the Obama White House, and Bookbinder and Shaw, who both work at the public-interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, are all prominent critics of Trump. Like me, and like many other commentators, they could be subject to confirmation bias. (That’s the tendency to interpret any new development or evidence as an affirmation of an existing belief or way of thinking.) But even allowing for some wishful thinking among the liberal commentariat, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump’s predicament has just become even more complicated and difficult to escape.
More and more, this is looking like a mobster roll-up of the type that some of Mueller’s team of ace prosecutors previously specialized in. In the beginning, the feds target one or two low-level insiders with legal vulnerabilities, obtain court orders to monitor their activities, and, hopefully, get them to coöperate with the government. Gradually, the investigators work their way up the chain of command to the crew captains—the capos—and, eventually, to the boss of bosses, the capo dei capi.
In this case, George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign who met with people with links to the Kremlin, provided the low-level entry points. The capos included Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser; Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager; and Rick Gates, Manafort’s former partner, who served as the campaign’s deputy chairman. Of these four Trump associates, three—Papadopoulos, Flynn, and Gates—are already coöperating with Muller, having pleaded guilty to felonies. And Manafort, facing serious financial charges in two courts, is under strong pressure to flip.
Now the feds are also putting the squeeze on Cohen, the trusted consigliere. While the investigators of Cohen’s case don’t work for Mueller, the two cases are clearly linked, and there would be nothing to prevent Cohen, in the interests of self-preservation, from eventually agreeing to coöperate with both the Southern District of New York and Mueller. No wonder Trump seems rattled.
No comments:
Post a Comment