Thread: Why Trump critics are now switching from impeachment to indictment

Why Trump critics are now switching from impeachment to indictment

By Howard Kurtz | Fox News
Published 6 days ago

'MediaBuzz' host Howard Kurtz weighs in on whether or not the frequent critical media coverage of Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will help or hurt her career.

Two decades ago, liberals argued that Bill Clinton should not be impeached for his tawdry affair with Monica Lewinsky because, well, his lies were just about sex.

Today, some liberals are arguing that Donald Trump should be impeached because of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal because, well, it's not the sex, it's the hush money.

For well over a year, Trump's critics have been banking on Robert Mueller to come up with evidence of Russian collusion, and there have been only disconnected fragments. So now —never mind! — it's about women and money.

The old argument from the left: Trump has committed crimes and should be impeached!

The new argument from the left: Trump has committed crimes and should be indicted!

I'm in no way excusing what went on with the two women from his past. But here's some perspective.

To be sure, Mueller's sentencing memos last week provided some leads on the Russia matter. Michael Cohen, for instance, admitted lying to Congress about the time period that the president's company was pursuing a real estate deal in Moscow, and the memo says Cohen discussed his testimony with people in the White House.

But in the blink of an eye, the media focus seems to be switching to the Stormy narrative — the case being pursued not by Mueller but by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan.

Here's a key difference between Trump and Clinton. The 42nd president had his dalliance with Lewinsky while he was in office, in the White House itself, with a subordinate who was a lowly intern. Trump's alleged affairs with a porn star and a Playboy model took place 12 years ago when he was a celebrity businessman.

That's why most people don't care about what Trump did as a private citizen, and I get it. I got a lot of flak when I started reporting on the Stormy case — first broken by the Wall Street Journal days before the election — and always stressed that it was the financial paper trail that might come back to haunt the president.

And that's why the Southern District's probe of Cohen — who was reimbursed for making the $130,000 payment to Daniels and brokered the National Enquirer's $150,000 payment to McDougal — is troublesome for Cohen's former boss.

Yes, it's a campaign finance violation, and yes, those are usually punished by fines or even a slap of the wrist.

But the argument that prosecutors could make is that it was an attempt to subvert the election.

National Review contributor Andrew McCarthy, who worked in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office and is a sharp critic of the Mueller probe, doesn't mince words in a piece for Fox:

"The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws."

McCarthy's argument is that when Cohen pleaded guilty in August, "prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made 'in coordination with and at the direction of' the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.

"Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all. Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud, involving millions of dollars."

There is, of course, the not-insignificant matter of the Justice Department practice that a sitting president can't be indicted. That's why Democrats like Adam Schiff are now saying Trump could face jail time after he leaves office (if he's not reelected). And MSNBC's Joe Scarborough says the Supreme Court will have to decide whether the president can be indicted for a crime "which helped him get elected."

Trump — proving that no one proofreads his tweets — said: "Democrats can't find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia." So now, he says, "the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution which it was not (but even if it was, it is only a CIVIL CASE, like Obama's - but it was done correctly by a lawyer and there would not even be a fine. Lawyer's liability if he made a mistake, not me). Cohen just trying to get his sentence reduced. WITCH HUNT!"

All Michael Cohen's fault, according to the president.

I don't minimize the importance of the payments to Daniels and McDougal to suppress their stories before the election. If a Democrat had done that, the right would be up in arms.

But I still think it's a stretch that it leads to indictment or impeachment, especially if the much-ballyhooed Russian collusion probe comes up dry.

And the reason is that the underlying offense (if there is one) was to keep embarrassing sexual disclosures from coming out. The point was to win an election, of course — and the president's pal at the Enquirer's parent company rolled over for him — but also spare Trump pain in his marriage.

My assumption is that much of the public won't see that as sufficient grounds to overturn an election or imprison a president — just as they didn't when Bill Clinton repeatedly lied about a similar subject.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He also hosts the MediaBuzzmeter podcast and is the author of "Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press and the War Over the Truth." Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/why...tcmp=obnetwork

Are people aware of the fact that the so-called "meeting" that allegedly occurred between Pecker of National Inquirer (AMI), Michael Cohen and someone else that people believe was Donald Trump took place according to the "indictment" was in August of 2015 a year before either Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal contacted Michael Cohen through the lawyers wanting money to keep their "stories" quiet?

Yeah, a full year BEFORE their requests for money through Non-disclosure agreements or selling their stories for money.

So, Michael Cohen is lying about these payments being discussed at that meeting with Pecker, because these claims hadn't even been made, no specific stories existed, so no agreements were in play and so obviously no payments in connection with non-existent stories and agreements were "discussed".

That meeting according to AMI was about AMI offering itself up to look for negative publicity and letting Trump know about it before it hit the presses. The whole idea for the meeting and this advance work was AMI's, not Trump's.

Prosecutors know their presentation of the timing of these events are false. They know they're falsely using a meeting that took place in August of 2015 with a payment made to Karen MacDougal inn August of 2016 as the same time period and they're doing that deliberately to confuse Judges, the Public, and Cohen himself.

They're doing the same thing on Don, Jr and Trump related to "Russia Collusion". They're using an email from Slater to Cohen which the prosecutors label as related to the Moscow project discussing comping a condo or apartment in Trump Tower in New York to Putin, that's from June 2015 as if it were an email sent to Cohen in June 2016.

Witnesses and targets of the Mueller probe, please exercise your constitutional rights that so many brave Americans have fought and died for so that you have them, and shut up and take the 5th. Taking the 5th does NOT mean you are guilty, it does NOT mean you have something to hide, it simply means you are exercising your protected and guaranteed civil rights in the United States under the United States Constitution.