Thread: Done With Michael Cohen, Federal Prosecutors Shift Focus to Trump Family Business

Done With Michael Cohen, Federal Prosecutors Shift Focus to Trump Family Business

By Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman
Dec. 9, 2018

When federal prosecutors recommended a substantial prison term for President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, they linked Mr. Trump to the crimes Mr. Cohen had committed in connection with the 2016 presidential campaign.

What the prosecutors did not say in Mr. Cohen’s sentencing memorandum filed on Friday, however, is that they have continued to scrutinize what other executives in the president’s family business may have known about those crimes, which involved hush-money payments to two women who had said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

After Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to breaking campaign finance laws and other crimes — he will be sentenced on Wednesday — the federal prosecutors in Manhattan shifted their attention to what role, if any, Trump Organization executives played in the campaign finance violations, according to people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s self-described fixer, has provided assistance in that inquiry, which is separate from the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In addition to implicating Mr. Trump in the payments to the two women, Mr. Cohen has told prosecutors that the company’s chief financial officer was involved in discussions about them, a claim that is now a focus of the inquiry, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

Mr. Cohen has told prosecutors that he believes Mr. Trump personally approved the company’s decision to reimburse him for one of the payments, one of the people said.

Neither the chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, nor any other executives at the Trump Organization have been accused of wrongdoing, and there is no indication that anyone at the company will face charges in connection with the inquiry.

But in recent weeks, the prosecutors contacted the company to renew a request they had made this year for documents and other materials, according to the people. The precise nature of the materials sought was unclear, but the renewed request is further indication that prosecutors continue to focus on the president’s company even as the case against Mr. Cohen comes to a close, the people said.

At the time of the payments to the two women, Mr. Trump was the head of the company, and although he turned over its management to his elder sons, he still owns it through a trust. While the prevailing view at the Justice Department is that a sitting president cannot be indicted, the prosecutors in Manhattan could consider charging him after leaving office. It is also possible the prosecutors could seek his testimony before he leaves office if they continue the investigation into anyone else who might have had a role in the crimes, a person briefed on the matter said.

A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for the federal prosecutors in Manhattan, the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Weisselberg, Mary E. Mulligan, also declined to comment, as did Guy Petrillo, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen.

In early September, before Mr. Cohen had completed his discussions with prosecutors and before the Southern District renewed its record request, Bloomberg reported that the Southern District was investigating Trump Organization executives other than Mr. Cohen.

Last month, Mr. Cohen unexpectedly struck a plea deal with Mr. Mueller over a new charge that he lied to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. In a court filing the following day, Mr. Cohen’s lawyers highlighted how he had spoken on numerous occasions to each of the prosecutorial agencies investigating Mr. Trump or his company.

Mr. Cohen has told the Southern District prosecutors that he arranged the hush money to the two women at the direction of Mr. Trump. In the filing on Friday, the Southern District prosecutors put the weight of their office behind Mr. Cohen’s admission, saying that “with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of” Mr. Trump.

The Southern District’s filing also said Mr. Cohen had provided potentially “useful information about matters relating to ongoing investigations being carried out by this office.” It added that prosecutors “assessed Cohen to be forthright and credible, and the information he provided was largely consistent with other evidence gathered,” a potentially problematic sign for the Trump Organization.

Though Mr. Trump’s lawyers declined to comment, people close to Mr. Trump argue that Mr. Cohen would not be sentenced now if he had substantially more to offer to investigators — and they note that the Southern District memo cited Mr. Cohen’s “pattern of deception that permeated his professional life.” What’s more, people who have worked for the Southern District have said that prosecutors might say things in a sentencing memo that they would not try to pursue as a separate case.

Mr. Trump lashed out at Mr. Cohen on Twitter in recent days, saying, “He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.”

One of the campaign finance charges Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to centered on Mr. Cohen’s paying $130,000 to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. The payment amounted to an excessive contribution to Mr. Trump’s campaign, prosecutors said, arguing that her silence helped his election chances and that campaign finance law prohibits individuals from donating more than $2,700 to a presidential candidate in the general election.

Mr. Cohen also pleaded guilty to “causing” an illegal corporate donation to Mr. Trump when he urged American Media Inc., which publishes The National Enquirer, to buy the rights to a former Playboy model’s story of an affair with Mr. Trump. The deal effectively silenced the model, Karen McDougal, for the remainder of the campaign.

Mr. Cohen has also told the Southern District that Mr. Weisselberg, who is one of Mr. Trump’s longtime loyalists, was involved in discussions about how to pay Ms. Daniels, according to a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Cohen linked him to the deal with American Media as well.

During the campaign, Mr. Cohen recorded a conversation he had with Mr. Trump about buying the rights to negative information American Media had collected on Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen told Mr. Trump, who did not know he was being recorded, that “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up.” The deal was signed by American Media and Mr. Cohen, according to court papers. But a person familiar with the arrangement said that Mr. Trump balked at reimbursing America Media, as had been agreed to, and the media company was never reimbursed in relation to Ms. McDougal.

But after the campaign, Mr. Weisselberg handled reimbursing Mr. Cohen for the payment to Ms. Daniels, according to people briefed on the matter. In early 2017, Mr. Cohen sought to recoup the $130,000 he paid out of his own pocket to Ms. Daniels as well as $50,000 he spent on a technology company in connection with the campaign, prosecutors have said.

Not only did the Trump Organization repay those expenses, but it agreed to pay taxes Mr. Cohen might have incurred on the reimbursements. This decision to “gross up” Mr. Cohen went against the Trump Organization’s typical reimbursement practices, people briefed on the matter said.

The company also agreed to pay Mr. Cohen a $60,000 bonus. (Mr. Cohen left the company once Mr. Trump became president). In total, the company paid Mr. Cohen $420,000, doled out in monthly installments of $35,000. In internal documents, the company “falsely accounted” for the payments as “legal expenses,” when, in fact, they were campaign expenditures, prosecutors say.

Mr. Weisselberg spoke with prosecutors this year from the Southern District when they were investigating Mr. Cohen. It is unclear what he said, and it is believed that he spoke on the condition that his statements could not be used against him.

One person familiar with Mr. Weisselberg’s work at the Trump Organization, who was not authorized to speak on his behalf, suggested that he might not have known the purpose of Mr. Cohen’s reimbursements, noting that Mr. Cohen often did personal legal work for the president and his family. That kind of work was generally performed with few, if any, questions asked, the person said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/09/u...osecutors.html

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There is nothing illegal about any of this. Non-disclosure agreements are legal as are the payments agreed to under them. Lawyers normally handle these agreements, so no payments to Cohen for handling them are illegal. Lawyers can pay them and be reimbursed as well as compensated for their services in connection with the agreements. It doesn't matter whether Cohen made the payments then billed for his services and those legal expenses and services were paid by the Trump Organization or Donald Trump personally. There's nothing illegal about a gross-up to cover income tax costs, this is done every day in every payment for goods and services in our country to cover income tax expense of the person providing the service or selling the product.

American businesses, entrepreneurs, famous people and why yes even politicians and officials pay billions of dollars a year in advertising, public relations, non-disclosure agreements and legal expense payments to protect their business, their brands, their names, their owners and key personnel from negative publicity, trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, patents and a variety of other bona fide business matters.

In these two instances of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the porn star and the Playboy Bunny, it's a matter of negative publicity that not only adversely impacts or could negatively impact the Trump Organization, the Trump brand, Donald Trump's reputation, and his family, specifically his wife and son.

Would it or could it also impact the election? Well, I guess it could but it would be waaay down the line of concerns, because after all, Hillary Clinton was winning by a mile, she was the shoe-in, all the polls said so, the election had been rigged in her favor, even more so than we even knew at the time, she was ahead by double digits in every major poll in the country, and while Trump continued to work his ass off to win the election, he didn't think he was going to win. We had the Billy Bush Tapes out already, we had the woman from the 70's who claimed Trump gave her a rub a dub in first class on an airplane, we had 12 others lines up after the Billy Bush Tapes claiming he had touched them, groped them, tried to kiss them, the woman who says he ran his hand up her dress in a bar in New York City, the beauty pageant contestants who claimed he looked at them funny and made them nervous, the Summer person who claims something happened in a motel in California while she was pursuing her restaurant idea, and the People magazine woman who claimed Trump attacked her during a photo shoot for People Magazine with Melania, the Butler, and the whole photo crew on the scene at Mar-A-Lago, and on and on and on. So for a porn star and a Playboy Bunny to come forth claiming sexual encounters with Trump 8 years earlier would just be 2 more on a list of many.

So what made them different than the others? They asked for money through lawyers before they went to the press, whereas the others went to the press first and then some of them hired a lawyer ruling out any non-disclosure payments for them. No one pays you after you talked to the press, they pay you before and then expect you to abide your agreement and never disclose your "story".

Both transactions are perfectly 100% legal and done every day all across the country for many different reasons, but the primary and most consistent reason is to avoid negative publicity that could harm your business, brand, name, key personnel and families. And 99.99999999% of non-disclosure agreement payments have absolutely nothing to do campaigns or elections. So for prosecutors to claim that these payments were "campaign" expenditures and should have been reported as such is beyond ludicrous.

Furthermore, for prosecutors to claim in their plea deal with Cohen that the primary purpose intent of Congress in passing campaign finance legislation was "transparency" concerning these types of matters is simply dishonest corruption by the Special Counsel and Southern District of New York US Attorney's Office, because nothing could be further from the truth.

Why do I say that? Because Congress had absolutely no intent to force candidates for public office to disclose such payments for such matters. Why do I say that? Because as we know there is this HUUUGE fund, a secret fund, that no one even knew about, except Congresscritters, a secret fund of money, to pay "hush" money to women and men for sexual related stories to keep them quiet through "settlements". These are politicians who run for office constantly, and House members who face elections every two years, who set up a fund, a secret fund, to pay this hush money for non-disclosure agreements to keep these stories out of the press, to specifically with willful purpose hide them from the public.

So, all anyone has to do with one of these "indictments" about campaign finance violations concerning payments made in accordance with perfectly legal non-disclosure agreements or related types of contracts, is just subpoena 435 members of the US House of Representatives and every staff member for every Congressional session we've had since campaign finance legislation was passed to testify in court under oath about their "secret fund" and the "intent" of campaign finance legislation, followed of course by Robert Mueller who got it so wrong with his "referral" to the Southern District of New York on Michael Cohen for "campaign finance violations". Yeah, it will make for a long trial, maybe the longest trial in US History, but it will be worth every damn minute of it.

The purpose of campaign finance disclosure laws was to have a record of donors to campaigns so Americans have the ability to see who is financing the campaign to deal with special interests. It has nothing whatsoever to do with non-disclosure agreements businesses and famous people pay to avoid the impact of negative publicity related to people claiming sex encounters whether they happened or not, whether the person is a businessman, politician, or candidate for office.

Michael Cohen made a really big mistake when he chose to hire Lanny Davis as his personal defense attorney. Lanny threw him under the bus and by the time Cohen could see that, it was too late for him. But I have to give it to Michael, he didn't flip, he refused a cooperating witness agreement, and good for him. A lot of people assume that because you're a lawyer you know everything, they really don't. They have specialties, and Cohen doesn't know anything about campaign finance laws or criminal law. He's a business attorney and overwhelmed by Mueller's goons, all the while having an attorney that's in bed with the goons. Sad situation if you ask me. I honestly hope Trump considers all this as time goes by, because Michael Cohen deserves none of this. He was targeted and framed, same as Manafort, same as all of them, simply because they supported Donald Trump for President of the United States.

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Headlines aren't facts and they aren't the law.

Originally Posted by Judy

Headlines aren't facts and they aren't the law.

Each of these headlines is shown to be fact by the info in the articles that go with them as well as other articles from numerous sources

as opposed to TWEETS, which are often total fabrications or out and out lies that provide no supporting data or source information but are believed by many naive people.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Each of these headlines is shown to be fact by the info in the articles that go with them as well as other articles from numerous sources

as opposed to TWEETS, which are often total fabrications or out and out lies that provide no supporting data or source information but are believed by many naive people.

No they aren't. But if you want to believe it, that's fine. Just don't think everyone who reads them falls for them, some of us actually take the time to read the article and determine for ourselves if what is published is accurate or not. But if you believe it, have at it.