Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Not sure if this was obvious or not but Michael Cohen turned over a very short list of documents but there was a subtext.

They were documents showing clear criminality.

Among those documents:

Financial statements from 2012-14 Trump used to seek a loan from Deutsche Bank.

1/

So, to put a very fine point on it:

Michael Cohen turned over to the House evidence he believes nails Trump for clear felonies.

And added subtext though:

A bank doesn’t generally dole out hundreds of millions in loans based solely on a borrower’s say-so.

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Deutsche Bank would have been negligent - potentially criminally so - if it hadn’t done its own due diligence on the accuracy of the loan application.

Banks don’t generally need to be prodded to vet applications.

Benign negligence would seem highly unlikely.

3/

While Cohen was nearly certainly handing over a smoking gun he knows for a fact will pin criminal liability on Trump, it also seems likely to put Deutsch in the crosshairs of public scrutiny as well.

They’re already under private scrutiny by investigators.

4/

Expect to hear calls to subpoena key Deutsche Bank figures imminently as well... and expect Deutsche to look to pin it all on Trump.

They certainly aren’t going to cop to being a clearinghouse for laundered money that led to doing favors for a friend of a friend...

5/

Russia is that friend.

Trump is the friend of that friend.

Deutsche was lending an utterly un-creditworthy Trump vast sums.

Looks like Miley Sportcoat might’ve just dumpster-dived through his boxes and pulled out a plum.

The fruit of Trump’s tree of dirty money.

6/

I’ll be shocked if we don’t hear of Deutsche Bank getting summoned to the Hill within a couple weeks...

...and the BEST part...

You’ll like this one...

In yesterday’s hearing, in their effort to impeach Cohen’s credibility, Republicans set a trap they can’t easily escape.

7/

One of the Oversight Committee members grilled Cohen about his own falsified loan applications and went to great lengths to explain how falsified apps hurt banks even when the borrower doesn’t default.

The bank is exposed to risk and may well have to put aside reserves.

8/

That results in the bank taking money out of the system that could have been lent to honest borrowers.

Having set that construct up, the Oversight Committee now has a pretext to pursue Trump’s loans REGARDLESS of whether they might prove to be triable criminally.

9/

The one thing that stuck in my craw was the paucity of documents Cohen turned over. It was so short a list.

In retrospect, it seems he pulled out only a few 236-carat diamonds the size of plovers’ eggs.

10/

If this is the case - and it very much seems like it is - Trump would have far more appreciation of the damage done than we do yet.

Trump would know Cohen just cooked his goose.

If that’s the case, we’ll likely know by 9 am tmrw when Trump wakes up in a fevered rage.

11/

I think Mike may have just redeemed himself far more than we know here.

Maddow just covered much of this (minus the Deutsche-side liability).

Oooh, Boy. I think we got handed some fruit yesterday. Felt like a couple apples but it was really a whole bushel.

12/12

p.s. for those bringing up Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin, he left Deutsche Bank in 2009 and was on the institutional side not the private banking side, so this doesn’t appear to involve him in any way.

Let me just add a couple quick things to this:

The loan Trump was seeking in the docs Cohen provided was to potentially purchase the Buffalo Bills football team.

That deal never happened.

So, the loan appears to have gone nowhere.

But...

Deutsche Bank did consummate loans totalling in the neighborhood of a billion dollar in the period before that attempted transaction.

If Trump did indeed grossly falsify the loan app, it begs the question of why he would’ve felt free to do that with a bank he had history with.

Meaning, you don’t generally grossly lie to someone you know does their homework and vets your claims.

You more likely lie when you know the party on the other side is going to go along with the lie.

Thus, the documentation Cohen provided may well demonstrate that Trump’s entire book of business with Deutsche Bank was predicated on shenanigans on Trump’s part which, either by error or design on DB’s part, were overlooked.

It is impossible for me to believe that a savvy institution would be snowed by a con no deeper than lying about asset values of properties.

I mean, it is not hard to request tax and insurance documentation verifying reported property values.

Certainly smells like Cohen turned over a snapshot of where and how the dirty money crossed the wire from lender to borrower.

Like giving security cam footage of the street corner where drug deals go down.

You only have to see one to see how it works and who’s involved.