1. Democrat Party & MSM Reckoning is Coming
Even with a rag tag "dirty dozen" team, Trump beat the formidable Clinton machine. That is how revoltingly sick most states were of the left. Those who want to take Trump down have no idea how deeply they're resented by the fair minded.
Even with a rag tag "dirty dozen" team, Trump beat the formidable Clinton machine. That is how revoltingly sick most states were of the left. Those who want to take Trump down have no idea how deeply they're resented by the fair minded.
2. Using an excellent piece by Mark Penn delineating the utterly partisan and selective application of statutes being perpetrated under the aegis of our Department of Justice, allow me to serialize the heinous movement under way to hobble a duly elected President.
3. Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the special counsel’s Manafort bin.
4. Manafort bin — the bin reserved for squeezing until the juice comes out. And now we are back to 1998 again, with presidents and presidential candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds & prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.
5. The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided to turn on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment.
6. That was clear the minute Cohen hired attorney Lanny Davis, a Hillary Clinton crony, who doesn't try cases. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold info about Trump (while acting as his lawyer) for millions of dollars, and didn’t pay taxes on millions.
7. The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign finance violations that were not campaign finance violations.
8. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures.
9. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs; they would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion.
10. There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual plea — Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for having “coordinated” the American Media Inc. payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment.
11. So Cohen is pleading guilty over a corporate contribution he did not make. Also, using this plea's logic, any time a TV station pays someone for a story that ends up helping/hurting a political candidate, it would be deemed a political campaign contribution.
12. But it is not deemed as such. That's why this is a bogus approach to federal election law. (Please note that none of the donors in the 2012 John Edwards case faced any legal issues and the FEC ruled their payments were not campaign contributions that had to be reported.)
13. Now, when it comes to Stormy Daniels, Cohen made a payment a few days before the election that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani says was reimbursed.
14. First, given that this payment was on Oct. 27, it would never have been reported before the election and so, for all intents and purposes, was immaterial as it relates to any effect on the election.
15. 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.
16. The usual procedures here would be for the FEC to investigate complaints and sort through these murky laws to determine if these kinds of payments are personal in nature or more properly classified as campaign expenditures.
17. And, on the Daniels payment that was made and reimbursed by Trump, it is again a question of whether that was made for personal reasons (especially since they have been trying since 2011 to obtain agreement).
18. Just because it would be helpful to the campaign does not convert it to a campaign expenditure. Think of a candidate with bad teeth who had dental work done to look better for the campaign; his campaign still could not pay for it because it’s a personal expenditure.
19. Now contrast this with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form.
20. And that despite crystal-clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed.
21. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, and yet, no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. Reason: It does not “get” Trump.
22. So, Trump spends $130,000 to keep the lid on a personal story and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney–client privilege to the wind.
23. Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs.
24. Remember that the feds tried a similar strategy against Democrat John Edwards in the 2012 case and it failed.
25. As Gregory Craig, a lawyer who worked both for President Clinton and Edwards, said: “The government’s theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution.”
26. And let’s not forget that Clinton lied about his affairs and, although impeached, was acquitted by the Senate. The lesson was clear: We are not going to remove presidents for lying about affairs, nor convict politicians on campaign finance violations for personal payments.
27. 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.
28. 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 Cohen to manufacture crimes in a naked attempt to take Trump down and defeat democracy.
29. Donald Trump should do a better job of picking aides who pay their taxes — but he’s not responsible for their financial crimes.
30. 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.
31. That’s why so many of his aides, lawyers and actions in the campaign and in the White House have undergone hour-by-hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia-collusion theory as the fake pretext it was.
32. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the FEC — and squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does not change those facts.
33. So, let the MSM keep beating the drums for Trump's impeachment on these flimsy, hyper-partisan renditions of drummed up charges that have absolutely nothing to do with Trump, and let Democrats in Congress, if they win the House, try to impeach President Trump.
34. If they do so, they will incur a wrath of such magnitude on the part of voters who will refuse to be disenfranchised by such a naked palace coup, that it will propel Trump into the White House with a landslide in 2020, and the Democratic House will fall with it.
The End
The End
