Trump’s Lies are, ever so slowly, Making Way for the Truth!

AS THE MUELLER PROBE HEATS UP . . .

by Selvam Canagaratna-December 29, 2018, 6:19 pm 

"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it."
– Theodore Roosevelt, Address, January 1904.

With one shoe after another dropping in Special Counsel Robert Muellerʼs Trump-Russia probe, James Risen, writing in The Intercept, was of the view that the increasing pressure was inevitably prompting the President to inadvertently blurt out the truth – "or at least as close to the truth as a serial liar like Trump can get."

In late November, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty in federal court to lying to Congress about a deal to build a Trump-branded skyscraper in Moscow. Most notably, he admitted that he had misled lawmakers when he told them that discussions about the project had ended by January 2016 when, in fact, the project was still under active consideration by Trump and his business organization just as the Republican Party was about to nominate Trump as its presidential candidate in the summer of 2016.

Cohen said that he lied in order to help Trump avoid the likely political fallout from the disclosure that the candidate was still trying to cut a business deal with people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin just as he clinched the Republican nomination.

Cohen’s latest admissions, including the disclosure that he talked to Trump about the proposed deal more frequently than he had previously acknowledged and discussed it with others in Trump’s family, are very significant because they shed new light on the relationship between Trump and Russia during the height of the presidential campaign.

Cohen now admits that ʽTrump Moscowʼ was still being considered as late as June 2016, the same month that the infamous Trump Tower meeting occurred in New York. During that meeting, Trump’s oldest son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, then his campaign chairman, met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others, including Rob Goldstone, a publicist for Emin Agalarov, a Russian singer and son of Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire with close ties to Putin.

Aras Agalarov had hosted Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow at a concert hall he owned; he had also been involved in discussions with Trump about building the skyscraper in Moscow. It was during the Trump Tower meeting that Veselnitskaya first mentioned she had derogatory material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Faced with Cohen’s late-November admissions in court, Trump at first tried to talk his way out of the corner by saying that Cohen was a "weak person and not a very smart person." But he quickly switched gears and effectively confirmed what Cohen had said. "There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?"

Risenʼs apt observation on Trumpʼs admission in the face of the Cohen disclosure in court: "They show the coarse, cynical approach Trump takes toward public service. But more ominously for him, they also reveal that he had much deeper connections to Russia in the midst of the campaign than he has ever previously acknowledged. It suggests that Trump will lie about his Russian connections until he realizes he can no longer get away with it, and then will quite casually admit that he has been lying all along."

Added Risen: "Of course, Cohen isnʼt Trumpʼs only problem. In fact, in the weeks since the midterm elections, a series of new disclosures has suggested that the Trump-Russia investigation is intensifying. And one sure sign that the President is worried about Mueller’s probe is the increased frequency with which Trump is now publicly attacking Mueller."

In fact, it seems that Trump’s biggest post-election nightmare has been Paul Manafort, especially after Mueller’s team said that Manafort has been lying to them in violation of a plea agreement he had reached with the prosecutors. Mueller’s team now wants a federal judge overseeing the case to set a sentencing date for Manafort, at which prosecutors say they will detail "the nature of the defendantʼs crimes and lies."

Mueller’s get-tough approach suggests that he thinks Manafort is still withholding critical information on the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia. Meanwhile, Manafort’s previous life as a longtime consultant to the pro-Russian leader of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his financial ties to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, have raised questions about whether he had, in fact, acted as an intermediary between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

In addition to Cohen and Manafort, argues James Risen, the role of the incendiary Roger Stone has come under further scrutiny. Apparently, there is new evidence – including in a draft court document – that Mueller is continuing to probe whether Stone served as an intermediary in 2016 between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.

Russian intelligence operatives hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were later released by WikiLeaks and proved highly damaging to Clinton. The Mueller investigation has also raised questions about whether conservative author Jerome Corsi had warned Stone ahead of time that WikiLeaks planned to release materials that would hurt Clinton’s campaign. Corsi has said that he has rejected a plea agreement with Mueller.

To top it off, George Papadopoulos, the onetime Trump campaign foreign policy aide, finally reported to prison recently. He had pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with Mueller in exchange for a very light sentence of just two weeks in prison. He had lied to investigators about his contacts with Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious professor who had told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of emails with derogatory information about Clinton well before their existence was publicly known.

"Given all this," concluded Risen, "it’s fair to say that the thrashing the Republicans suffered in the midterm elections wasn’t the worst thing that has happened to Donald Trump."

Meanwhile, in an Op-Ed in Truthout magazine, Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, noted that as evidence of law breaking by Donald Trump continues to emerge, commentators were speculating whether a sitting President could be indicted, even though the Department of Justice had twice before opined in the negative – during the Nixon and Clinton administrations.

Her view, however, was that nothing in the Constitution would prevent Trump from being criminally indicted while he occupies the Oval Office. Trump is apparently implicated in at least three federal criminal investigations: Mueller is examining violations of campaign finance laws in connection with Trump Tower Moscow; Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have documented campaign finance violations stemming from hush money paid to Trump’s alleged paramours in order to influence the presidential election; and the New York US attorney’s office is analyzing whether Trump’s inaugural committee received illegal payments for presidential access and policy influence.

Marjorie Cohn noted that Richard Painter, chief ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, had recently said that Trump’s only chance to protect himself and his family from legal jeopardy was to strike a plea bargain with prosecutors. "Donald Trump is in serious trouble," Painter stated. "His lawyers ought to be telling him to negotiate a plea deal. Get him out of the White House. Have him resign, plead guilty to lower charges and let’s move on as a country."

Concluded Cohn: "The Constitution does not prohibit indictment of a sitting President. Will Mueller recognize this reality in his actions going forward?"