“Whatever he did he did on his own.”
That’s the key point from today’s interview with Fox News. Michael Cohen says otherwise, but Michael Cohen is an untrustworthy dirtbag by universal acclamation. (Cohen himself all but admitted it yesterday in court.) You’re not going to prove Trump did anything wrong based on Cohen’s testimony alone.
But what if David Pecker also testifies that Trump directed Cohen to arrange unreported campaign contributions in the form of mistress payoffs? What if Pecker has already begun whispering about that to newspapers? What if he has hard evidence of wrongdoing?
And what if there’s a third person who has information and is prepared to testify about Trump directing Cohen to break campaign finance laws — someone very much on the inside, privy to many of POTUS’s private dealings? Because there might be, you know.
When Cohen released that tape of him and Trump talking about buying back the rights to McDougal’s story from AMI, Cohen mentioned how he had consulted with [Allen] Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, about how to make it happen .
[T]his week the New York Times reported that Cohen has indeed told investigators that Weisselberg was involved in both payments [to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal]…
Cohen said Tuesday before he was sentenced that he “felt it was my duty to cover up [Trump’s] dirty deeds.” We know of one dirty deed in which Cohen has implicated Weisselberg, whether Weisselberg did anything wrong or not. So how many other dirty deeds are there? And how many of them might Weisselberg be able to shed light upon?
Like Pecker, Weisselberg received immunity from the feds in August in exchange for his testimony. The significance of that can’t be overstated: Weisselberg may know Trump’s business in greater detail than anyone on earth. What if he confirmed for the feds that Trump knew all about the Stormy and McDougal payoffs and ordered Cohen to carry them out?
That would shred POTUS’s remaining defense, that Cohen went rogue on all of this stuff and did it without ever telling him. Or rather, that would shred his last factual defense. Conservative lawyers are riding to the rescue today with a legal defense, namely that the payoffs to Daniels and McDougal simply can’t be characterized as campaign contributions *even if* they were made for the purpose of influencing an election.
