Donald Trump is a convicted felon and obviously not qualified to lead- #DumpTrump

Echo editorial opinion published in The New York Times:

#TrumpIsNotQualified

In a humble courtroom in Lower Manhattan, a former president and current Republican standard-bearer was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The jury’s decision, and the facts presented at the trial, offer yet another reminder — perhaps the starkest to date — of the many reasons Donald Trump is unfit for office.

The guilty verdict in the former president’s hush-money case was reached by a unanimous jury of 12 randomly selected New Yorkers, who found that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging.

#TrumptyDumpty

Americans may wonder about the significance of this moment. The Constitution does not prohibit those with a criminal conviction from being elected or serving as commander in chief, even if they are behind bars. The nation’s founders left that decision in the hands of voters. Many experts have also expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor, and Trump will undoubtedly seek an appeal.

Yet the greatest good to come out of this sordid case is the proof that the rule of law binds everyone, even former presidents. Under extraordinary circumstances, the trial was conducted much as any other criminal trial in the city is. That 12 Americans could sit in judgment of the former and potentially future president is a remarkable display of the democratic principles that Americans prize at work.

Justice Juan Merchan, the jury and the New York State legal system delivered speedy justice, providing Americans with vital information about a presidential candidate before voting begins. Multiple polls have shown that a conviction will affect the decisions of many voters.

The verdict itself establishes that Trump committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016, presidential election. It revealed even more evidence of what Trump is willing to do, including breaking the law and pushing others to break the law, for political gain. That chronic impulse — to override democratic norms and the law to his own ends — is at the heart of two other criminal cases against Trump, for the much more serious charges of spreading lies and participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020, election. He is also charged with mishandling highly classified national security documents after leaving office; twice, he showed classified documents to people who were not authorized to see them, according to that indictment. Trump’s lawyers have managed to delay those three trials.

The former president has never shown much moral rectitude, but the facts presented at the New York trial revealed more information that the public should know about the unethical way that Trump conducts his life and his business. Prosecutors laid out the details of the payoff in careful detail: Shortly after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape and less than two weeks before the 2016 election, Michael Cohen, who was then Trump’s lawyer and fixer, paid Stormy Daniels, a porn star, $130,000 to keep quiet about the 2006, sexual encounter she said she had with Trump.

A payoff like this is not illegal by itself. What makes it illegal is doctoring business records to mask its true purpose, which prosecutors said was to hide the story from the American people to help Trump get elected. Prosecutors had to show that this payoff was made at Trump’s behest and that Trump knew the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for the payoff was falsely categorized as a legal expense to disguise it. The evidence they presented, both direct and circumstantial, showed Mr. Trump’s personal involvement in the scheme, and its motivation.

Justice Merchan was scrupulous in ensuring that Trump received a fair trial. He refused, for example, to allow the jury to hear sensational material, such as audio from the “Access Hollywood” tape or subsequent allegations of sexual assault against Trump, that could have been prejudicial to his rights as a defendant. Yet throughout the trial, the judge was forced to deal with Trump’s attempts to undermine the legal system. To protect its integrity, Justice Merchan put a limit on what Trump could say to prevent him from attacking and threatening jurors, witnesses, court personnel and even the judge’s family. Trump repeatedly flouted that order and was fined $10,000 for contempt of court. Only the threat of a jail sentence finally seemed to keep Trump in line.

In the end, the jury heard the evidence, deliberated for more than nine hours and came to a decision, which is how the system is designed to work. In the same way, elections allow voters to consider the choices before them with full information, then freely cast their ballots. Trump tried to sabotage elections and the criminal justice system — both of which are fundamental to American democracy — when he thought they might not produce the outcome he wanted. 

So far, they have proved resilient enough to withstand his (unhinged❗) attacks. The jurors delivered their verdict, as the voters will in November. If the Republic is to survive, all of us — including Trump — should abide by both, regardless of the outcome.

Donald Trump's cult followers share the childish trait of believing in an imaginary friend

Tump is a convicted felon He was found guilty by a New York jury on thirty-four felony charges, the first time this has happened for a former and perhaps future president. He may have been David Pecker's real life "imaginary friend"- IOW believing his friendship with Trump could do no harm.

Like ‘Being Friends with a Hurricane’ by Fintan O’Toole
For the fixers, enablers, and vassals who surround Donald Trump, the rewards of his friendship are not worth the risks.

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City, in April that when they spoke together, he called him “Donald.” 

While Pecker was giving his evidence, Trump also referred to him publicly by his first name. Speaking to the media outside the courtroom, he said, “Dave has been very nice, a nice guy.” 

David Pecker: The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump

The message to Pecker was clear: be nice to your old buddy. Trump was invoking the bond of reciprocity created by long intimacy, in this case a relationship built up over a quarter of a century. Yet as the prosecution complained before Pecker resumed his testimony, Trump’s words also carried an implicit threat: to the injunction “be nice” was appended a silent “or else”—not quite the language of genuine friendship.

The trial itself was a product of Trump’s inability to grasp the idea ofmutual obligation. It seems apt that at the heart of such an astounding moment in American history there is such a banal betrayal. Trump almost certainly wouldn’t have been prosecuted on those charges if he hadn’t been such a lousy friend. During their deliberations the jury asked to hear again portions of Pecker’s testimony that concerned an arrangement in 2016 to pay $150,000 to Karen McDougal, with whom Trump had an affair in 2006 and 2007. Pecker understood, as he told the jury, “that I would be either reimbursed by the Trump Organization or by Donald Trump.” If Trump had honored that deal and given Pecker what he was owed, Pecker would have later repeated the same maneuver to buy and suppress Stormy Daniels’s story of her brief sexual encounter with Trump. Thus Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, would not have had to pay Daniels $130,000 himself, and Trump’s reimbursement of Cohen would not have been recorded fraudulently as legal fees.

Donald Trump "like being friends with a hurricane"- Fintan O'Toole

Pecker told the court, “I felt that Donald Trump was my mentor. He helped me throughout my career.” He also confirmed multiple times that he understood Trump to be his friend. That relationship was the prism through which Pecker viewed the whole business of catching and killing salacious stories on Trump’s behalf. Asked whether he had formal arrangements with Trump to ensure repayment, Pecker replied, “No, they weren’t put into writing. It was just an agreement among friends.” The operation was based on personal trust.

Yet Trump stiffed him. Pecker needed to recoup the $150,000 he paid to McDougal because it was too large a sum to hide from his parent company. The failure to pay was, for him, difficult and distressing. He was repeatedly reassured by Cohen: “Don’t worry…. The Boss will take care of it.” Even bearing in mind that Trump’s real wealth has been grossly exaggerated, $150,000 was not a lot of money for him. But it was a great deal more than Pecker’s friendship was worth.

This episode tells us something much bigger about Trump. One of his favorite sayings, which he misattributes to Abraham Lincoln, is “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” This is an accurate enough summation of the instrumental view of human relationships typical of autocrats. Trump’s problem, though, is that, as Pecker discovered, his friendship is little better than his enmity (or risking his hostility. Even when it is obviously in his own interest to help those who are loyal and useful, he cannot be trusted to do so.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy gives us the fullest sense of what it’s like to be a hanger-on in the court of a capricious narcissist. A pair of courtiers compare such a life to playing chess in the dark, on a board of jelly, with chessmen made of butter. 

Over the course of the three novels, two dazzlingly successful servants of Henry VIII, Thomas Wolsey (b. March 1473 –d. November 1530) and his protégé, Thomas Cromwell (b. 1485- d. July 1540), lose the king’s favor. They are stripped of power and then of life. This downfall, in the world Mantel conjures in such convincing detail, is inevitable. The psychopathic ruler’s ultimate expression of power is the destruction of those on whom he has relied most, the ones who have been such good servants that they have developed the temerity to imagine themselves as indispensable. In the end Cromwell is forced to reflect that “Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.”

Cardinal Wolsey former Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain

Yet Mantel’s novels also show that where there is risk, there can be reward. We understand why Wolsey and Cromwell, who are no fools, accept the hazards implicit in the task of navigating the big boss’s whims, rages, moods, and desires. The recompense is as lavish as the danger is acute. They get to build opulent palaces for themselves. They eat the best food and wear the finest clothes. They establish their own satellite courts with their own hangers-on and loyal retainers. They shine with the reflected luster of the monarch’s power and prestige. Part of what makes the novels so gripping is that the risk seems just about worth it. Ultimately it may have been a losing game, but while it lasted it gave these consummate players immense pleasure.

This is one of the things that is so peculiar about Trump’s nexus of power: the rewards are not worth the risks. He hates those to whom he has incurred debts. In her book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman quotes an anonymous longtime friend who says that “being close to Trump was like ‘being friends with a hurricane.’” He is more a black hole than a sun king. Mantel’s Cromwell, in serving his master, imagines that “I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper.” Many of Trump’s servants—even if they had souls to begin with—have been so flattened and pressed by the overwhelming density of his self-regard that one has to wonder why others continue to propel themselves into his field of gravity. The typical autocrat revels in his power to give and take; Trump takes everything but gives back only grief and shame.

On April 21, 2018, Robert Costello, acting as a go-between for Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, sent an e-mail to Cohen. Less than a fortnight earlier federal agents had raided Cohen’s office and seized documents related to the $130,000 payment Cohen had made to Daniels on Trump’s behalf. The purpose of Costello’s e-mail was to reassure Cohen that he would be protected: “I spoke with Rudy. Very, very positive. You are loved…. Sleep well tonight. You have friends in high places. Bob. P.S. Some very positive comments about you from the White House.” At Trump’s trial, Costello confirmed that “‘friends in high places’ definitely refers to President Trump.” When Cohen was asked, “What did you understand Mr. Costello to mean by ‘you are loved,’ by whom?” he answered, “By President Trump.”

This is how hierarchies of autocratic power are supposed to operate. Vassals like Cohen do their master’s bidding, and in return they have friends in high places who will protect them from the consequences of their nefarious actions and reward them for their service. 

But no object of Trump’s love gets to sleep well. Cohen went on to spend thirteen and a half months behind bars and a year and a half in home confinement. He is just one of hundreds of Trump’s supporters and followers who have endured humiliation and disgrace.

Giuliani filed for bankruptcy last December, has lost his license to practice law in New York, may be about to lose his license in Washington, D.C., and faces criminal indictments in Georgia and Arizona. His old age is shadowed by the knowledge that he will die broke and dishonored. The same goes for Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization and perhaps Trump’s most trusted functionary. He was sentenced in April to five months in jail after pleading guilty to two counts of perjury during his boss’s civil trial for fraud. It is his second sojourn in the notorious Rikers Island jail—he served one hundred days there in 2023 for offenses committed as Trump’s right-hand man.

Political enablers like Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and Sidney Powell have faced—or still face—various criminal charges. Even those (like Flynn, Stone, and Manafort) whom Trump pardoned had to pay large legal bills and will always bear the stamp of criminality. Lawyers who were sucked into Trump’s orbit—including Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman—are under indictment for their parts in Trump’s schemes to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. So are dozens of people who served as fake electors. And more than 460 Trump supporters have been imprisoned for taking part in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Among the 244 people who received felony convictions connected to the invasion, the average sentence has been about three and a half years. These are catastrophic outcomes, destroying relationships, careers, and reputations. The prize for their devotion to Trump is a world of pain.

Even those who’ve avoided such disasters have to face Trump’s sadistic ingratitude toward supposed friends. To Mike Pence, Trump “was my president, and he was my friend.” That friendship did not move Trump to talk his fans out of wanting to hang Pence on January 6. Ronna Romney McDaniel served Trump with unctuous loyalty as chair of the Republican National Committee. Her obsequiousness extended to dropping, reportedly at Trump’s request, the half of her surname that linked her to her uncle (and Trump critic) Mitt Romney. Trump nonetheless dumped her in February, in part to clear the way for his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to become cochair of the RNC. 

McDaniel’s subsequent media career as a political analyst for NBC lasted less than a week before the network dispensed with her, too.

Or consider the pitiful fate of Chris Christie. He imagined himself to be not just a political ally of Trump but a close personal friend; as Christie wrote in his hilariously self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “He told me he loved me.” In return, as governor of New Jersey, Christie became the first senior member of the Republican establishment to endorse Trump for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016—a gesture that marked Trump as a serious contender rather than a mere insurgent outsider. Christie then spent nearly six months leading a team of 140 people to draw up detailed plans for the transition to a putative Trump presidency. When Trump was duly elected and Christie arrived at Trump Tower with his thirty binders full of blueprints for the new administration, they were sent straight to the dumpster and Christie was informed by Bannon that “we do not want you to be in the building anymore.”

In all of this, Trump’s concept of friendship seems even emptier than that of his notoriously nasty mentor Roy Cohn.
Haberman writes of Cohn:

To the degree he followed rules, they involved a vague, menacing concept of “friendship.” In 1978, Cohn laid out to the journalist Ken Auletta how far he would go to protect those he saw as friends. “I wouldn’t lie under any circumstances. But I’d do everything I could, within the bounds of legal propriety, not to hurt someone whose friendship I had accepted,” he said.

Trump seems to have no such rule. He seems utterly indifferent to the hurt of his friends.

Even with Cohn himself Trump seemed incapable of generosity. Cohn had used all his dark arts for his protégé: “He’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Trump recalled, and said that if he were to sum up his personality, “I think the primary word I’d use is his loyalty.” Yet this did little to affect Trump when Cohn’s former companion Russell Eldridge was terminally ill with AIDS. Trump gave the dying man a suite in his Barbizon-Plaza Hotel but sent the bills to Cohn and tried to insist that he pay them. Knowing that Cohn himself had AIDS, Trump moved his own legal business elsewhere; Cohn was said by his secretary to be “plainly crushed.”

When his younger brother, Robert, died in 2020, Trump wrote in a statement, “He was not just my brother, he was my best friend.” At a press conference he remarked, “We’ve had a great relationship for a long time, from day one.” Yet according to Robert Trump’s obituary in The New York Times, the two men were estranged for years:

Simply being a close family member did not shield him from his brother’s rages when Donald Trump needed someone to blame. Family friends said that as Donald’s star grew, Robert struggled with working for his brother and cast himself as his brother’s polar opposite.

In her family memoir Too Much and Never Enough, Donald’s niece Mary L. Trump wrote of how he tormented Robert from the time they were children:

Donald had discovered early on how easy it was to get under Robert’s pale skin and push him past his limits; it was a game he never tired of playing. Nobody else would have bothered—Robert was so skinny and quiet that there was no sport in tormenting him—but Donald enjoyed flexing his power, even if only over his younger, smaller, and even thinner-skinned brother. Once, out of frustration and helplessness, Robert kicked a hole in their bathroom door, which got him into trouble despite the fact that Donald had driven him to it. When his mother told Donald to stop, he didn’t.

Plato, in The Republic, described the inescapable wretchedness of the tyrannical character; he can never really have a friend:

Men of his kind behave in the same sort of way in private life, before they have gained power. Their companions are parasites in every way subservient to them, and they are themselves always prepared to give way and put on the most extravagant act of friendship if it suits their purpose, though once that purpose is achieved their tune changes.

The consequences of this friendlessness, Plato noted, only worsen as the tyrannical character gains power:

His power will make him still more envious, untrustworthy, unjust, friendless, and godless, a refuge and home for every iniquity, and you can see that he’s a source of misery above all to himself, but also to his neighbours.

This condition was, in the Greek worldview, the ultimate in existential bleakness: “So tyrannical characters pass their lives without a friend in the world; they are always either master or slave, and never taste true friendship or freedom.”

Both sides of this master/slave duality apply to Trump’s practice of friendship. The first is obvious in his refusal of reciprocity: for Trump, friendship is a one-way street. The slavish aspect is evident in his extreme reluctance to repudiate any source of support, however repellent. In 2016 he was very slow to disavow the enthusiastic endorsement of the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. As president, he was so loath to offend white supremacists, antisemites, and neo-Nazis that he called those who took part in a violent rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people.” In 2022 he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the antisemite Kanye West. Of West he later wrote, “We got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on [the Fox TV program] ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?”

Trump can seem almost childishly desperate to impress even when he is not currying favor with anyone he perceives to have power or fame or anyone who offers him political backing. His efforts to show off at a meeting at his Bedminster golf club in 2021 make him sound like an eager teenager trying to ingratiate himself with the in-crowd. Trump allowed the group, including the ghostwriter working on Meadows’s memoir, to see a secret contingency plan for an attack on Iran: “It’s so cool. I mean, it’s so, look…and you probably almost didn’t believe me, but now you believe me.”

Likewise Trump has always been anxious to claim celebrities as friends. Michael Jackson, Trump tweeted on his death, “was a great friend and a spectacular entertainer.” Joan Rivers “was an amazing woman and a great friend.” Trump was “taking piano lessons from my friend Elton John.” Whitney Houston “was a great friend and an amazing talent.” Andy Williams “was a friend of mine and a great guy.” Tom Brady is, whether he likes it or not, “a friend of mine, he’s a great guy.” “Do you think,” Trump asked his Twitter followers in 2013, “Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?” After Trump became president, Putin had to vie for his affections with “my good friend, President Xi of China,” “my friend Kim Jong Un,” and even Queen Elizabeth II, of whom “I am a great friend and admirer.”

This habit of inventing friends was also part of Trump’s shtick in dealing with subordinates. Cliff Sims, who worked for him in the White House, noted in his memoir, Team of Vipers, that “as I got to know Trump, he’d often cite various nameless ‘friends’ whose statements or experiences fit neatly into whatever point he wanted to make.” It is an extraordinary thought: the most powerful man in the world had to fabricate friends in order to convince a relatively junior staffer of the rightness of his opinions.

What are the political implications of Trump’s friendlessness? One is that it contributes to the instability of his use of power. Trump has not been able to create a fixed cohort of political intimates. He has even alienated many of his most prominent enablers, including William Barr, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and Mick Mulvaney. Successful authoritarian (as opposed to totalitarian) rulers cultivate networks of loyalty by offering intimacy, patronage, and protection. They institutionalize their authority by recruiting and embracing individuals who in turn can sustain the support of wider groups. These friends of the regime benefit from the boss’s largesse. This is the system perfected, for example, by a politician Trump greatly admires, the Hungarian prime minister and pioneer of “illiberal democracy” Viktor Orbán. In March the US ambassador David Pressman said of Orbán’s Hungary:

All aspects of government power—from procurement, to licensing, to tourism subsidies, to concessions, to tax and audit actions, to regulatory policy—provide favorable treatment for companies owned by party leaders or their families, in-laws or old friends.

Trump, though, is not very good at this kind of personal patronage. His sleaze is primarily nepotistic and self-serving. He keeps too much of it in the family.

Yet this failure has a paradoxical quality. Trump’s faithlessness makes the faith of his acolytes all the purer. In the Republican Party’s congressional caucuses, cynical calculation still dominates: many of its members despise Trump but do his bidding either because they are afraid of him or because they need his help with their voters. But beyond the cohort of professional representative politicians there are the true believers who, unless they are stupid, must know that if they get burned on his behalf Trump will do nothing to save them. In the typical nexus of political corruption, the hanger-on has reasonable expectations of protection and advancement. Having a friend in the highest of places is a clear advantage. The wages for dirty work are good. But Trump’s love is now so plainly tainted that any calculating opportunist has to factor in the probabilities of imprisonment, bankruptcy, and disgrace. 

When the Boss is not just mad and bad but so obviously dangerous to know, serving him must be thought of as an act more of self-sacrifice than of self-interest. This may sound quite sweet, but what it really amounts to is a gradual replacement of coldly self-serving shrewdness with genuine fanaticism. The first is corrupt; the second is deadly. Those who embrace the possibility of pain for themselves are all the more willing to inflict it on others.

This is true of the inner core of Trump’s enablers, but what of the millions who love him? Friendship, for them, operates in two ways. One is their bond with one another. Meadows, in his memoir, writes of the sense of affinity among those who attend Trump rallies:

In general, I found them to be some of the kindest, most generous people I had ever met. Many of them had met one another at Trump rallies in the past. There was a kinship in the MAGA movement that is almost never reported on, and it includes people from all walks of life. In the months that I had been traveling to rallies with President Trump, I had spent time with carpenters, computer programmers, business owners, and used car salesmen, all of whom seemed like the best of friends as soon as the MAGA hats came out. I saw bartenders milling about with medical doctors, and groups of young people mixing with retirees like it was the most natural thing in the world.

This may be sugarcoated, but there is no reason to doubt its essential truth. The MAGA movement may symbolize hatred, but among its devotees it radiates good vibrations.  (A cult trait!)

And Trump, as the occasion of this overflow of amity, seems, if not exactly friendly, then certainly friend-like.

Trump also fills the need, in a harsh and confusing world, for an imaginary friend. The make-believe companion can be forgiven all slights and failures. It is striking that toward the end of his testimony at Trump’s criminal trial, David Pecker was anxious to make clear that in spite of being essentially robbed by Trump, “I have no ill will at all. And I still consider him a close—I still, even though we haven’t spoken, I still consider him a friend.” (Ironically, it was probably this evidence of continuing loyalty that made Pecker’s testimony so damaging to Trump—unlike Cohen, whose hatred for his old boss oozed from every pore, Pecker did not appear to be contaminated by enmity.)

That’s the thing with imaginary friendship—even when the friendship is patently false, the imagination can still make it feel real. Trump, as president, treated most of his voters as he’s treated Pecker. He failed to keep his promises. He didn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something “beautiful,” or make the superrich pay higher taxes, or “drain the swamp” of corporate lobbyists, or become “the voice” of American workers, or eliminate the federal deficit, or bring all the coal mines back to West Virginia, or build a coast-to-coast wall and make Mexico pay for it. 

Most of his voters did not, in reality, have a friend in high places. But that has only sharpened their desire to believe that “the Boss will take care of it.” The more Trump suffers for his own crimes, the more his voters need to believe that he is suffering for them.

Trump paid illegal hush money to Stormy Daniels because he had sex with her and wanted to keep her quiet

Echo OPINION //EDITORIALS published in the Houston Chronicle

Trump’s felony conviction over porn star hush money recalls a simpler time – when sex scandals mattered | Editorial

Manhattan after the #Trump34 jury's guilty verdict 

There was something almost quaint about the particulars of the Donald Trump hush-money case that ended Thursday with a guilty verdict: a time capsule from a bygone era when political candidates assumed their transgressions still carried consequences.

After all, Trump’s rationale for paying off porn star Stormy Daniels was that their lurid affair — which she reportedly was shopping around to news outlets and that he denies took place — would do irreparable damage to his 2016, presidential campaign. His former fixer Michael Cohen confirmed as much. Cohen testified that the payments to Daniels were made shortly after the leak of the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about grabbing women’s genitals, suggesting the campaign feared Trump could not withstand another “October surprise” in a close race against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

So in the final days of his campaign, he sought to bury the Daniels tryst the same way any wealthy lout would: with cold, hard cash. 

He directed Cohen to funnel $130,000 to Daniels by siphoning the cash from his family business and falsely labeling the transactions as legal expenses. We’ll never know whether doing so saved him from defeat that year, but it’s fair to say this was just the beginning of Trump corrupting the electoral process behind the scenes.

Four years later, his attempts at election interference would be far more grandiose. Armed with the power of the presidency, a legion of supporters in denial about his decisive loss to Joe Biden and an inner circle of obsequious aides and advisers eager to overthrow democracy, he would hatch an insidious plot to keep him in the White House. What happened next — a violent insurrection at the Capitol — was one of the most disgraceful events in American history and put the danger of a possible second term in stark relief.

How far would he go if he got another crack at leading the country?

That we even had to entertain such a hypothetical speaks to the steady erosion of norms and values that both parties once claimed to cherish. In no sane universe should Trump have a second chance. Congress had two opportunities to extinguish his flame, send him back to Trump Tower with his tail between his legs, a disgraced president that the annals of history would frown upon as a cautionary tale for our fragile democracy.

Of course, those impeachment attempts failed, giving the Republican Party a chance to test just how short our collective memories are. The party leadership easily could’ve disavowed him in favor of a fresh face for the GOP, one who could ably take on Biden, who, despite a mountain of accomplishments, is perceived as weak.

Alas, the GOP’s pact with Trump is apparently signed in blood. 

Even the few Republicans who spoke out against him in the wake of January 6th, quickly came running back. Now it’s as if they never left.

Combing through GOP politicians' statements after Trump’s conviction is to witness an exercise in delusional sycophancy. You’d expect the shameless boot-lickers such as Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham to spin the verdict as the result of a sham trial in a rigged system. When respected voices in the so-called “party of law and order” — looking at you, John Cornyn — parrot these ridiculous statements, it’s fair to question just how far Republican leaders are willing to debase themselves just to regain power.

Even those clinging to the prospect of a reversal of the verdict based on the lack of specificity in jury instructions are tethering their integrity to a technicality, not any evidence exonerating Trump or proving wild conspiracy theories that he was framed by the Biden administration. And no, this verdict isn’t based solely on the word of confirmed liar Michael Cohen. It was based on reams of documents and corroborating testimony.

Still, you don’t have to be a political pundit to understand that the gravity of the hush money case was far less than Trump’s other alleged crimes. For those of us waiting on real accountability for Trump, the New York verdict provides cold comfort. The felonies he was convicted of are all of the low-tier, non-violent variety, each carrying a maximum sentence of four years. The fact that this is Trump’s first conviction, he’s old, and he’s running a national campaign for president will likely weigh on the scope of Judge Juan Merchan’s sentence. One thing both presidential campaigns, and constitutional scholars, agree on: Trump can return to the White House with a felony conviction.❗😡😠

If there’s any hope to be gleaned from Trump’s conviction, it’s that the myth of the Teflon Don has shattered. For all his bluster that he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and walk away scot-free, it had to be humbling for him to be treated like any other perp in a Manhattan courtroom, with no TV cameras for him to preen for. Only his frumpy visage immortalized by bizarre courtroom sketch caricatures. Even Trump’s post-conviction statement lacked his usual bite, a low-energy burst of recycled Trumpisms — “rigged, disgraceful trial,” “country gone to hell,” etc. — which played like a sad trombone.

And yet, this verdict isn’t the death blow his opponents have longed for. It remains to be seen whether our justice system can navigate the absurd uncharted territory of a felonious ex-president fighting off 54 other criminal charges across three jurisdictions. It’s an open question whether Biden will even attempt to weaponize Trump’s criminality. After all, if there’s anyone who can spin a felony conviction as an act of martyrdom, it’s Trump. Naturally, within minutes of his conviction, his campaign sent out a fundraising pitch on his TruthSocial platform. And he claims the money is rolling in, more than $34 million since the verdict.

“I am a political prisoner!” Trump’s post read.

Not really, Donald.😒 Chances are you won’t see the inside of a prison cell at all. Maybe not ever. But one can dream. And we do.

Republican party tanked to a new low in in their kowtow response to the Trump cult

Echo editorial board opinion published in the: The Washington Post:

The Trump hush money trial shows how far the GOP has fallen. (Maine Writer- Nothing "grand" about the Grand Old Party's MAGA cult fealty to Trump.)

Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. is the 37th District Attorney elected in Manhattan.   (Thank you 🙏😍Mr. Bragg.)

Of the four criminal cases pending against former president Donald Trump, the one tried in a New York criminal court involved both the least serious charges against him and the most legally debatable. 

But the results from the Manhattan proceedings have  provided a damning indictment of the Republican Party over which the defendant, the soon-to-be official GOP presidential nominee, holds sway.

When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed a 34-count business records falsification indictment against Trump last spring, legal analysts acknowledged it could be a tenuous case. 

The core offense was the alleged rebranding, in the Trump Organization’s internal documents, of a secret hush money payment paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels as a legal retainer to attorney Michael Cohen. The charge would usually be a misdemeanor, but Mr. Bragg was able to charge it as a felony by alleging that the payments amounted to an illegal campaign contribution (in violation of federal law), on the theory that the coverup was an attempt to influence voters in the 2016, election.

Manhattan hush money trial witness Michael Cohen

This was — and, more than five weeks after the trial began on April 15, still is — a venturesome strategy, lending some credence to critics’ claims that the prosecution by an elected Democratic district attorney in a deep-blue city was politically motivated. Mr. Bragg’s team did a fair job of rebutting that and demonstrating the link, aided by documentation that includes checks personally signed by the then-commander in chief. 

It appears as though the jury believed Mr. Michael Cohen, the defendant’s erstwhile fixer, who has already pleaded guilty to various offenses including lying to Congress, admitted multiple fibs in his testimony for the prosecution and wobbled under cross-examination.

The jury decided x 34- Trump paid off the the porn star because, he believed, he needed to suppress the seamy story, to win the election.

The mere fact such questions are relevant to the 2024, presidential race, let alone potentially pivotal to it, speaks volumes about the political moment.

The trial has taken the country back to the waning days of the 2016, campaign, when The Post had just reported on the “Access Hollywood” tape of Mr. Trump speaking cavalierly of sexual assault: “Grab ’em by the p----y. You can do anything.” Trump seemed on his way to losing to Democrat Hillary Clinton and taking the rest of the GOP down with him. 

Multiple Republicans, trying to control the damage, called on him to resign as GOP nominee. Then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan declared himself “sickened.” Mr. Trump won anyway. (He did, however, apologize first — a rarity for him.)

In hindsight, this episode was the beginning of Trump’s unconditional hold on the Republican (MAGA cult❗) base, and the beginning of the end for what was left of the traditional GOP. 

Those who denounced him in the fall of 2016, have either left politics — or fallen in behind Trump. Hence the pilgrimage of Republicans to Trump’s trial in Manhattan. 

Everyone from would-be Senate Majority Leader Rick Scott (R-Fla.) to House Speaker (Bible thumping!) Mike Johnson (R-La.) to Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to Vivek Ramaswamy paid their respects. Even Nikki Haley — who, when running against Mr. Trump for this year’s GOP nomination, called his lack of character disqualifying — said this week she would vote for him in November.

The country, and the party, have come a long way since 2000: Then, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, running to replace President Bill Clinton — who had been impeached, and acquitted, for alleged perjury to hide an affair — pledged to “restore honor and integrity” to the White House. That implied a connection between character and policy. But now, the operative GOP principle seems to be "anything goes".

To be sure, the conduct at issue in the New York trial seems minor relative to the charges Trump faces in his two stalled federal trials: obstructing justice after sneaking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago or, worst of all, conspiracy charges tied to the January 6, 2021, mob attack on the electoral vote count in the Capitol. But the New York case and the GOP hierarchy’s reaction to it are points on the continuum in which excusing little or midsize ethical violations leads to excusing bigger ones.

The New York (Manhattan) jury decided the evidence proved the complex charges beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Republicans repeating and repeating - broken records of the 78 RPM vintage

Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee need counseling about the causes of repetitive behaviors....like they just couldn't *think* during the Michael Cohen interviews....their brains behaved like they were in a frozen embryonic state of confusion.

MaineWriter- In my opinion, the Republicans who interrogated the witness Michael Cohen during his day of public "coming clean" truth telling, were exhibiting signs of desperation.  They spoke like the old party of bumbling idiots that couldn't form even one cohesive question. Every one of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee reacted stupidly in their rhetorical comments, like Rep. Mark Green, who said, to the effect, "All people in Tennessee agree with me...." (Oh paleeeze, let's talk about who was lying in that comment?). They were an embarrassment to their party and to the nation. An echo opinion published in the Orlando Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, reflects my sentiment.  I believe Michael Cohen.

History repeats....and repeats....like a broken 78 RPM record with scratches....

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee acted like parrots playing the rhetorical game of "pete and repeat"!

To the Editor of the Orlando Sentinel:

The Michael Cohen hearings (“Cohen assails former boss,” Feb. 28) revealed several important points that left me disappointed and not surprised. 

(Michael Cohen's opening statement transcript in The New York Times at this link here.)

Obviously, it is no secret, that Michael Cohen lied in the past and done things he is not proud of. The public may have known about some, as the media has informed; but, the hearings told us more. Why then did most of the Republican congressmen on the committee begin their questioning stating that information? Perhaps the method of questioning was avoidance or inability to admit their Republican president represents such negative traits. If one were to close their eyes during the seven hours of testimony, I don't think guessing which side of the aisle was questioning would be difficult. To my personal recall after listening, I did hear one Republican member question in a appropriate fashion and he is to be commended.

Living in the Washington, D.C., area during the Watergate hearings and actually attending one of the hearings, it felt a bit like history starting to repeat. The repetition being the subject of power and how it often leads to corruption. Furthermore, it is an attitude of climbing to the top by clinging to those thoughts to represent some kind of power. Michael Cohen seems to have done that and as he continues to expose unsavory deeds by the president, many wonder the outcome.

Lessons may or may not be learned as the lure of money and power are a compelling force and if anyone is an unintended example of what not to fall into, it is Michael Cohen. There will be many opinions as to whether his testimony was credible, I think it was.

Joy Peeler Longwood

Mueller is doing right by "following the money"

Ann echo opinion by Carl Hisiro, a retired attorney, and an occasional PennLive Opinion contributor. He writes from Susquehanna Township in Pennsylvania.

Watching the legal travails surrounding Donald Trump and his inner circle over the past week in the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller over Russian tampering in the 2016 election, it’s tough not to be reminded of the Watergate scandal and the last days of President Richard Nixon’s White House.

In the past few days alone, we’ve seen former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s guilty plea; the collapse of a plea agreement between Mueller and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Tuesday’s release of a heavily redacted sentencing memo suggesting former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn cooperated extensively with Mueller’s office to avoid jail time for lying to Congress.

History reminds us that Nixon’s ultimate downfall began when then White House Counsel John Dean decided to testify to Congress about his knowledge of the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s fate is tied to Cohen’s decision to cooperate not only with Mueller’s ongoing investigation, but with three other law enforcement agencies, by providing some 70 hours of testimony. Based on news reports, it appears that Flynn’s cooperation could be of similar impact.

Before the election, I wrote that Trump would be the most conflicted president ever elected, and that these conflicts could threaten our national security. I remain as convinced as ever that is the case.

My position has only been reinforced by allegations that Trump continued to pursue efforts to build a new property in Russia well into the 2016 campaign.

We’ve since learned that that the Trump Organization had offered Russian leader Vladimir Putin a $50 million Penthouse in the Trump Tower as part of a kickback to get the deal approved by the dictator. And while all of this was going on, Trump repeatedly denied on the campaign trail that he had “any business dealings with Russia.”

In sum, while Trump was campaigning for president in 2016, he was secretly interacting with a hostile foreign government to close on perhaps Trump’s largest business transaction ever.

The American public was entitled to know about this enormous conflict of interest, but were denied the truth before the election by Trump’s repeated denials on the subject.

With Trump, Mueller is doing the right thing by “following the money” to connect the dots on Russia. With Trump everything is about the money.

The Trump Organization is a family business where Trump micromanages everything. It is hard to imagine anything happening within the company, especially meetings with top Russian officials right under Trump’s nose in his NYC Trump Tower, that he didn’t know about at the time it occurred.

The other fascinating fact that is hard to ignore is how Trump often acts more like a Mafia boss instead of the chief law enforcement officer of the country when he reacts to any negative news involving the Mueller investigation.

We saw it with Manafort when Trump praised Manafort for not cracking when he first refused to cooperate with Mueller and instead went to trial. Now, we see it again when Trump last week called Cohen “a weak person” when Cohen decided to cooperate fully with Mueller’s probe and his concurrent praise of Trump insider Roger Stone for his refusal to cooperate with Mueller.

The larger question is whether Trump’s base will stick with him as these revelations continue to mount; as Mueller releases his final report, and as the 2020 campaign draws ever nearer.

Like Nixon more than 40 years ago, Trump has repeatedly taken steps to interfere or otherwise obstruct ongoing. That’s included his purges at the Justice Department.

History is definitely repeating itself as we slowly grind to the finish line. However, there is one difference between now and the Watergate scandal. What Trump is being accused of relating to Russia and his other business dealings, if proven true, makes Nixon look like a nickel and dime crook by comparison.

Trump ringmaster for a carnival of lies and crooks

An echo opinion by Kathleen Parker published in The Washington Post 
WASHINGTON — Michael Cohen was Donald Trump's personal attorney. In fact Trump hired Mr. Cohen.  Therefore, Mr. Cohen's guilty plea Thursday, admitting that he lied to Congress about Donald Trump's interests in building a Moscow tower, comes as little surprise — because everyone attached to this corrupt administration seems to lie with ease. 

(IMO, Donald Trump is a repulsive red hatted ring leader for a staff muzzled by loyalty and thereby, they enable his serial lying!)

And yet Cohen's admission is explosive news in the carnival-kingdom of liars, crooks and thieves.

Cohen, who probably knows more than anyone about Trump's (IMO shady and treasonous!) business dealings — excepting, perhaps, special counsel Robert Mueller — admitted having falsely claimed that efforts to build a Trump Tower Moscow ended in January 2016. 

Everyone attached to this corrupt administration seems to lie with ease ~ Kathleen Parker

Aaahah! It turns out that those negotiations actually continued through mid-June of that year.

What's a few months, you say? But, of course, Trump would want to expand his real estate empire to Russia, as he reportedly has been trying to do for 30 years. As for Trump's lying to the American people, we all know how little this matters to the Republican Party base. Simply put, they don't care. The Don's a tycoon, after all — a mogul, a celebrity, a really big deal, let me tell you. Besides, they would contend, little white lies never hurt anybody. Impervious as Trump loyalists are to the behavior of sewer rats, nothing Trump does — including, theoretically, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, as he once noted with a soupçon of admiration — seems to threaten the moral fibers of the Republican tapestry.

But the littlest of lies can wreak havoc. Just ask Bill Clinton. And Richard Nixon. And, Cohen, and Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, who recently ended his plea relationship with Mueller. Trump's own lies, which number in the thousands, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker, haven't yet hurt him enough to perp-walk him out of the White House, but the night is young. Indeed, the president's tangerine-colored, Teflon-coated, tricky-dicky, slick-willie ways just might be running out of legs.

With Cohen's plea, the president has secured a position heretofore reserved for others: He's now officially a person of interest and even has a legal code name — Individual 1. Suffice to say, it could have been much worse. But what a lovely gesture from the FBI — providing a moniker better suited to the subject than "president."

Needless to say, Individual 1, or I-1 for short, has accused Cohen of lying to spare himself. So many pants; so many fires. 

So grows the nose once the first lie is told. When everybody's a liar, is Lady Justice left to weigh whose lies are most credible? Perhaps this is what's taking Mueller so long to create a report. But the number of Trump associates who've left the swamp to sing for Mueller seems by now to outnumber those left for Trump to fire. Surely, a preponderance of evidence can't be far off.

In the meantime, Trump has created a path through this byzantine labyrinth of deceit and betrayal by dropping crumbs of doubt to show the way. Each crumb corresponds to what and whom he considers a threat. For example, Trump detested and, ultimately, fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. Obviously, he had wanted Sessions to serve as soldier, spy, tinker — and to tailor things to suit the president. (Forgive me if this is too easy.)

For nearly two years, Trump has attacked the FBI and the special counsel. An innocent man need attack no one. From early in his campaign, while privy to ongoing business negotiations with Russia, he was touting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia generally. Just hours after Cohen's plea, Trump canceled his planned meeting with Putin at the G-20 in Argentina this weekend.

One may read the crumbs as one wishes, but facts don't lie — and them's the facts. Even though most legal experts see no grounds for criminal charges (yet), it's clear that Trump (again) lied to the American people and pursued a course he hoped would benefit him personally, contra his America-first trope. 

Emails from this same period show Cohen sought a financial endorsement from Russia for a Trump Tower project. Meanwhile, Putin was saying flattering things about Trump.

Perhaps most telling, I-1 has strategically sown seeds of doubt in American institutions, especially the justice system, while making himself potentially vulnerable with our chief geopolitical foe (H/T Sen. Mitt Romney). Apparently, Trump would rather his supporters lose faith in their country than in the man they elected to disrupt it.

If that's not technically a crime, it is surely criminal. (IMO, it's criminal to betray the trust a leader is given; when the behavior of that leader, in exchange for the trust, is serial lying.)
Kathleen Parker is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. 

A bad day in Trumpzi world - Associated Press echo essay

A bad day in court for former associates of Donald Trump could foreshadow hard days ahead. An echo published by the Associated Press and published in NJ.com

George Stephanapolos: Is Michael Cohen prepared to tell everything he knows about President Trump to special counsel Robert Mueller and other prosecutors?

In a New York courtroom, Trump's former personal lawyer and "fixer," Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations. 

Cohen said Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, acknowledging the payments were made to influence the election.

In Virginia, a jury found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty of eight financial crimes unrelated to the campaign. It was the first trial victory for prosecutors in the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose investigation Trump has derided as a witch hunt.

What do the developments Tuesday mean for the president? Some questions and answers:

Does Cohen's guilty plea mean Trump violated the law?

Cohen said in court that he made one payment "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office" and the other "under direction of the same candidate." The amounts and dates all line up with the payments made to Daniels and McDougal.

Prosecutors did not go as far as Cohen did in open court in pointing the finger at the president, saying Cohen acted "in coordination with a candidate or campaign for federal office for purposes of influencing the election." Legal experts said there could be multiple reasons for government lawyers' more cautious statements.

Daniel Petalas, former prosecutor in the Justice Department's public integrity section, said the issue of whether Trump violated the law comes down to whether Trump "tried to influence an election, whether he knew and directed it and whether he knew it was improper."

But Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a statement: "There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the President in the government's charges against Mr. Cohen."

Trump denied to reporters in April that he knew anything about Cohen's payments to Daniels, though the explanations from the president and Giuliani have shifted multiples times since.

Does Cohen's plea mean Trump could be forced to submit to questions?

Trump's lawyers have been negotiating with Mueller about whether the president would submit to an interview as part of Mueller's Russia investigation. Now Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti says he'll renew efforts to get Trump to submit to a deposition in a lawsuit Daniels filed to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement she signed ahead of the 2016 election.

Avenatti tweeted that the Cohen pleas should "permit us to proceed with an expedited deposition of Trump under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it."

Daniels' case is currently on hold, but Avenatti said he'll be looking to get that hold lifted.

In a 1997 Supreme Court ruling, in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones against President Bill Clinton, the court held that a sitting president could be made to answer questions as part of a lawsuit. But that ruling did not directly address whether a president could be subpoenaed to testify in a criminal investigation, a question the Supreme Court may have to confront if Mueller tries to compel Trump's testimony in his probe.

If there is evidence of wrongdoing, can Trump be indicted?

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice and guidance to executive branch agencies, has held that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Trump's lawyers have said that Mueller plans to adhere to that guidance, though Mueller's office has never independently confirmed that. There would presumably be no bar against charging a president after he or she leaves the White House.

Sol Wisenberg, who conducted grand jury questioning of Clinton as deputy independent counsel during the Whitewater investigation, said he still wanted to see more details of Cohen's plea deal. But he said: "Obviously it's not good for Trump. The stuff on Stormy Daniels is not good for Trump."

"I'm assuming he's not going to be indicted because he's a sitting president," Wisenberg said. "But it leads him closer to ultimate impeachment proceedings, particularly if the Democrats take back the House."

Trump on March 18, 2018, intensified his attacks on Mueller's Russia investigation as biased against him, but stopped short of targeting the special counsel -- whose ouster lawmakers warned would cross a "massive red line." 

In early-morning Twitter flurries, Trump insisted that Mueller's team of investigators is staffed with "hardened" Democrats biased against him.

Does Cohen's plea mean Trump could be forced to submit to questions?

Trump's lawyers have been negotiating with Mueller about whether the president would submit to an interview as part of Mueller's Russia investigation. Now Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti says he'll renew efforts to get Trump to submit to a deposition in a lawsuit Daniels filed to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement she signed ahead of the 2016 election.

Avenatti tweeted that the Cohen pleas should "permit us to proceed with an expedited deposition of Trump under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it."

Daniels' case is currently on hold, but Avenatti said he'll be looking to get that hold lifted.

The Supreme Court in 1997, ruling in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones against President Bill Clinton, held that a sitting president could be made to answer questions as part of a lawsuit. But that ruling did not directly address whether a president could be subpoenaed to testify in a criminal investigation, a question the Supreme Court may have to confront if Mueller tries to compel Trump's testimony in his probe.

How does Cohen's plea relate to the Mueller investigation?

While the Manafort case was part of Mueller's investigation, the Cohen case was not. It was handled by prosecutors in New York. Still, it could give Mueller a boost.

Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, argued that Cohen's plea knocks back the argument that the investigations swirling around Trump are a "witch hunt," as the president has called Mueller's Russia investigation.

"No longer can you say Mueller is on a witch hunt when you have his own lawyer pleading guilty to things that were designed to impact the election," she said.

If there is evidence of wrongdoing, can Trump be indicted?

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice and guidance to executive branch agencies, has held that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Trump's lawyers have said that Mueller plans to adhere to that guidance, though Mueller's office has never independently confirmed that. There would presumably be no bar against charging a president after he or she leaves the White House.

Sol Wisenberg, who conducted grand jury questioning of Clinton as deputy independent counsel during the Whitewater investigation, said he still wanted to see more details of Cohen's plea deal. But he said: "Obviously it's not good for Trump. The stuff on Stormy Daniels is not good for Trump."

"I'm assuming he's not going to be indicted because he's a sitting president," Wisenberg said. "But it leads him closer to ultimate impeachment proceedings, particularly if the Democrats take back the House."

Trump on March 18, 2018, intensified his attacks on Mueller's Russia investigation as biased against him, but stopped short of targeting the special counsel -- whose ouster lawmakers warned would cross a "massive red line." In an early-morning flurry on Twitter, Trump insisted that Mueller's team of investigators is staffed with "hardened" Democrats biased against him.

How does Cohen's plea relate to the Mueller investigation?
While the Manafort case was part of Mueller's investigation, the Cohen case was not. It was handled by prosecutors in New York. Still, it could give Mueller a boost.

Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, argued that Cohen's plea knocks back the argument that the investigations swirling around Trump are a "witch hunt," as the president has called Mueller's Russia investigation.

"No longer can you say Mueller is on a witch hunt when you have his own lawyer pleading guilty to things that were designed to impact the election," she said.

Could Trump pardon himself?

Trump has already shown he's not afraid to use his pardon power, particularly for those he has viewed as unfair victims of partisanship. He pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who clashed with a judge on immigration, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Bush administration official convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a leak case.

As for whether a president can pardon himself, not surprisingly, courts have never had to answer that question. Giuliani, Trump's lawyer, has said it won't come to that anyway.

"Pardoning himself would be unthinkable and probably lead to immediate impeachment," Giuliani told NBC's "Meet the Press" in June. "And he has no need to do it, he's done nothing wrong."

Still, Giuliani argued that Trump "probably does" have the power to pardon himself.

Trump denied to reporters in April that he knew anything about Cohen's payments to Daniels, though the explanations from the president and Giuliani have shifted multiples times since.

Trump is now a political quadriplegic - echo opinion

Historians will mark August 21, 2018, as a turning point in American history.

Published in Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Michael Cohen made the ethical decision to admit to criminal behavior at the direction of Donald Trump

"Trump has been clever about having the people around him take the fall, a fate he likely will inflict on his own son, Don Jr., with regard to the meeting with the Russian government agent Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in summer of 2016."

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer pleaded guilty to 8 counts of criminal wrongdoing that could carry a sentence of up to 65 years.

Most significantly, he pleaded guilty to having attempted illegally to interfere in an election “in coordination with and at the direction of a federal candidate for office.”

AFP writes,“Just days before the election, Cohen paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her past with Trump.

He also was involved in buying for $150,000 the rights to the story of Playboy model Karen McDougal about her alleged affair with Trump.

Those actions, which involved shell companies and offshore entities controlled by Cohen, got him into legal trouble over banking, tax and campaign finance laws.

Cohen initially said he used his own money to pay Daniels and was not reimbursed. Trump, who first denied knowing anything about the payment, has since conceded that Cohen was paid back.”

Although Cohen was involved in a crime in preventing information from surfacing relevant to the election by basically bribing eyewitnesses, Trump’s crime was not exactly the same. If you considered getting his ex-lovers to remain quiet to be a campaign expense, he would have been within his rights to spend money on it. Trump’s crime would be in not reporting it to the Federal Election Commission.

While some are arguing that neglecting to report a couple hundred thousands of dollars in campaign expenses is a relatively minor crime, that is not really true. Former presidential candidate John Edwards was prosecuted for similar payments, to his lover Rielle Hunter, and the only reason the Federal case failed was that prosecutors couldn’t prove the money was paid to keep the public from knowing about the affair, as opposed to keeping Mrs. Edwards in the dark. But given the timing of the payment to Ms. Daniels, and given the knowledge and cooperativeness of Mr. Cohen, prosecutors who brought Trump up on charges would almost certainly prevail.

Trump is, of course, unlikely to be put on trial while in the presidency. He could, however, end up being deposed, just as Bill Clinton was, and then he would either have to admit the affair and the payoff or continue to lie about them. The latter course of action, given Cohen’s own plea, would certainly be perjury.

If Democrats can take the House in November, they could launch an investigation that would throw up further evidence for Trump law-breaking, or which might tempt him to continue lying, which could become perjury if he did it in formal circumstances.

The crux may be a matter of public opinion more than legal, in the end. Above all, the likelihood that Trump’s evangelical base can go on pretending he doesn’t have serial affairs, and can go on denying the swampy corruption at the center of this administration, is low. And without that base, Trump has almost nothing.

Trump has been clever about having the people around him take the fall, a fate he likely will inflict on his own son, Don Jr., with regard to the meeting with the Russian government agent Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in summer of 2016.

But with Cohen’s plea, for the first time someone has laid a hand on Trump himself. There are almost certainly emails or recordings to back Cohen up.

For the first time since Watergate, the president is an unindicted co-conspirator in a crime under continued investigation. Whether or not impeachment is ultimately in the offing, Trump’s cripple presidency just became a quadriplegiac and is now living on borrowed time, one way or another. And, it seems certain that when he goes out of office, he is going to prison for crimes committed in and prosecuted by New York state.

Chicago Tribune report follow up to the above:
Donald Trump will always look to someone else to who he can assign blame for his own actions.