Trump hits back at former attorney Cohen, praises Manafort

On 21 August 2018, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and self-described “fixer”, pled guilty to eight criminal charges, two of which were election law violations concerning the facilitation of hush money payments made in the run-up to the November 2016 general election to women who allegedly had affairs with Trump. He could get about four to five years in prison at sentencing December 12.

He says “of course there could be something” that would leave him unable to forgive Trump, but he doesn’t “see what that could be”.

Davis had earlier said that Cohen would be willing to cooperate with the Russian Federation probe, and that he’d refuse any pardon from the president.

One of the legal issues in Cohen’s indictment is that the payments amounted to a campaign contribution, and one that was not reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Court papers say that Pecker “offered to help deal with negative stories about (Trump’s) relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided”.

Part of what makes it too early to tell where the NY probe goes prior to Cohen’s scheduled December sentencing is the volume of evidence prosecutors received from the Cohen raids.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, warned Trump against any efforts to buy the silence of Cohen or Manafort.

Manafort, Mr Trump wrote, had “tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break'”. Meaning, he didn’t pay off two women alleging affairs with Trump out of the goodness of his heart and then not report it.

What does this mean for Trump?

Here are five questions (and answers) about President Trump and the legal problems with those hush payments.

“The case, it really isn’t about sex or adultery or any of that”, Reid said.

“He knows that he did nothing wrong and that there was no collusion”, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

Klein added that the “general consensus in the legal, academic world is that you can not indict a sitting president”. “So, Lanny Davis’ statement is very misleading and deceptive”, Jarrett said.

The biggest threat Trump faces may prove to be political, rather than criminal. The suit also claimed that the foundation “illegally provided extensive support to his 2016 presidential campaign by using the Trump Foundation’s name and funds it raised from the public to promote his campaign for presidency”.

The developments raise the probability of a move to impeach the President if the Democrats take back control of the House in the Nov 6 elections. Impeachment proceedings are tried in the Senate, where Republicans hold a slim 51-seat majority.

Stumping for candidates in West Virginia on Tuesday night, Trump did not mention Cohen or Manafort, but did again attack Mueller’s investigation as “fake news” and a “witch hunt”. Instead of trying to lessen his sentence to cooperate with Mueller on what he knows about the Trump campaign and Russia, Manafort went to trial and now could spend the rest of his life in prison.

But if it did, the most straightforward lesson would be one we already know all too well: The president surrounds himself with crooks.

Asked about the Michael Cohen plea deal Wednesday, Sens.

He also said Cohen might go before Congress to testify. “A prosecutor is unlikely to bargain for specific sentencing provisions unless that has happened”.

The document gives no more information about this payment, but the language suggests investigators may know more details about it – including the technology company in question – that they have not yet revealed.

There is no confirmation that Cohen will speak to Mr Mueller’s Russian Federation inquiry.

And for the moment, that seems to be the Right’s only requirement of Donald Trump: Don’t get removed.

“My observation is that the topics relating to hacking and the crime of hacking. that there are subjects that Michael Cohen could address that would be of interest to the special counsel”, Davis said in a series of television interviews. There are no charges against him in this.

Even if Cohen does not cooperate with Mueller, his case could still bear on the special counsel’s investigation in another way.