the first loopty loop came over the weekend. top trump aide gives mueller coveted details. white house counsel strategy evolves into survival tactic. monday trouble came in the form of the president s long-time personal lawyer, loans inquiry may soon put michael cohen in a bind. that was a generation ago. on tuesday, wow, the president s campaign chairman paul manafort was convicted of eight criminal felonies. he s facing around a decade in prison with another trial ahead. on any other day, that story would have had the front page all to itself. but look over to the left of your screen. it was pushed to the side in the relatively humble font by this, pleading guilty, cohen implicates president. the president s personal lawyer saying he committed eight different felonies with two of those felonies, quote, in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office. we know that to be donald trump. there is reason this headline is in all caps. there s a reason it stretche
so, my read into this is that he s gets immunity in the hope that he can provide help with someone else and cohen doesn t look like the big fish that sdny would be going after here. so the implication is there s a bigger fish, we re trying to figure out who that is. the obvious choice is donald trump sr. but it could be donald trump jr. or eric. those are the only possibilities of somebody who s more senior to weisselberg in the organization. would that be true? at least in the organization, and it s important that when you give someone immunity and try to keep going up the chain in a prosecution, you don t always succeed. but these are good prosecutors, they know how to do these kinds of cases. it seems unlikely to me that they would have given weisselberg a pass if they didn t think he had value to offer them. the benefit of immunity is that i guess you re supposed to tell the prosecutors whatever they want to know or whatever you know, and in exchange for that you can t be p
and somebody who obviously works for allen weisselberg. there s nobody above. so, if there s some conversation between allen and don sr., don jr. or eric, it s not captured in that information. let me just ask you to be clear about what this trust is, there s the trump organization. there s the trump foundation, a charity that is being looked at now legally by the attorney general of new york, but this is a trust. weisselberg said, please pay this from the trust. is this the company that donald trump got up in that press conference and announced he was handing over to his sons? that s right. the trump trust is basically an umbrella group that includes the trump organization. so, when donald trump entered office, he kept ownership of his company, he kept the right to withdraw money from it at any time, he just changed something about the administration of it so while he still owns it and can withdraw money from it, he put it in this trust run by eric, don, and allen weisselberg. it
the entire length of the newspaper and seems to be screaming at you at the top of its newspaper lungs. this is the sitting president basically being called an unindicted co-conspirator to a crime as an active participant in an illegal hush money payment by michael cohen to boost trump s chances of becoming president. this is trump s long-time personal lawyer, this guy here, declaring in open court under fear of perjury that he was directed to commit that crime by candidate donald trump and that they conspired together in the act for the sole purpose of getting donald trump closer to the oval office. that s what michael cohen pled guilty to in those two felony counts. that news this week, that the sitting president was not only adjacent to criminal activity during the election but an active participant in it. that opens a brand-new window into the way we view this presidency and what might come
but in this particular case the argument the president did something illegal prior to being in office but did so with the aim of gaining office becomes relevant to the impeachment discussion. yeah, i think so. i mean, i agree with what adam has to say there. an analogy to that might be when people procure their naturalization by fraud. they become a u.s. citizen but if you go back and unwind it and look at their application, if they lied to obtain citizenship, then a judge can strip someone of their citizenship. it s kind of the same concept. if you obtain this thing by fraud, you should not be permitted to keep the benefit of that fraud, so i also think this week president trump has never looked more frightened and more like a mobster than when he talked about that flipping should be illegal. unbelievable. people who talk like that are people who are really afraid of people who are telling the truth about them. so, i think that he is cornered and he knows it and he s very concer