AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Late one October night, I was getting ready to shut off my computer and head to bed when I got a message from my friend and fellow RedStater, Jennifer Van Laar, asking me to look at a document she had just received. Received through anonymous means, the document seemed to detail out Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China. There were pictures of Hunter meeting with Chinese officials, documents, travel records, financial records, flow charts, and timelines for Hunter’s business transactions, which painted a picture even more corrupt than anyone could have imagined.
Neither Van Laar nor I were ready to gamble our credibility on the contents of the report. We spend the next several days digging through the report, independently verifying each and every point made. We used Secret Service travel records, independent media reports, government financial transaction records, and some good ol’ fashioned journalism to corroborate the dark details con
cohen being i m dieted and once that happens the analysis changes pretty significantly. let me get katie go on, michael. i agree with that but there s also a number of cases and we cited in our briefing that holds that even in the face of an indictment it doesn t necessarily follow that a stay is ordered, but i agree that it gets a lot closer to that result. katie, i want to bring you in here. just so people get the scope of what michael cohen is facing, not only is he facing the prospect of having to face michael avenatti on the civil suit to get out of this agreement at this point i don t know why he doesn t just drop it, but anyway he s facing potential wire fraud, bank fraud, campaign finance violations and he is also facing the history here. michael flynn who was donald trump s national security adviser has already pleaded guilty, paul manafort indicted, rick gates pleaded guilty and cooperating, george papadopoulos pleaded guilty. can you just sort of give the lay viewe
after talking to donald trump, with donald trump asking him all these questions, also saying, can you please see your way to letting michael flynn go? andrew mccabe, he told three people afterwards what happened in those one on one meetings with trump. he told andrew mccabe who has been fired had his pension stripped, he told baker and he told james rybicki. one more piece of evidence, a timeline of events leading to jim comey being fired, january 6, comey briefs trump on the dossier. trump is inaugurated. six days later, sally yates tells them michael flynn could be compromised. gates is fired. flynn resigns. trump calls comey and lift the cloud over him by ending the investigation. comey doesn t do it. he gets fired. trump tells the russians he fired comey to ease the pressure
the window closes for ever getting discovery out of him. michael? well, i mean, i think that s a good point. we could be delayed for a significant period of time as a result of this stay, you know, frankly reading the tea leafs and you never know what s going to happen in a case like this, but we were very confident coming out of the hearing, i think the judge who is an exceptional judge, one of the finest in the country really understood the issues, i think that he agrees with a number of our arguments and, you know, i do not think there is going to be a stay. i think the judge is going to fashion some protections for michael cohen as it relates to his fifth amendment rights and the judge is basically going to give us an opportunity to depose him and say that if michael cohen wants to assert his fifth amendment right that s fine, he is entitled to do that, but there s consequences for that and that s no different than litigants day in and day out across the united states. michae
when you re talking about the reince priebus conversation, for those not up on the full comey memo, that is a conversation in which comey apparently asked is asked by reince, is it the private conversation, i replied it was, he said he wanted to ask me a question. decided if it was appropriate. do you have a fisa order on michael flynn, a question that might not have been appropriate to ask. i want to come back to you, paul butler, to this lawsuit, i can envision a lawsuit in which the democratic party says we would like to depose julian assange. we would like to depose everyone who was in that trump tower meeting. that s jared kushner, paul manafort, that s donald trump jr. is that possible that lawsuit could yield that kind of discovery? absolutely. there s a different standard, first of all, in criminal cases than civil cases. there s a lower standard of proof. so civil cases are take longer, especially when there s an ongoing criminal investigation.