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Michael Cohen is headed to prison, but that doesn’t mean that prosecutors are done investigating the scheme to pay off Trump’s alleged mistresses and keep them from being a 2016 election scandal. After a federal judge sent the president’s former fixer to prison for three years, deputy U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami revealed that the tabloid publisher run by Trump’s pal David Pecker struck a deal to help in the Cohen case—and they could be helping out in another one.
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We lied: When Playboy playmate Karen McDougal told reporters that National Enquirer publisher AMI had bought the rights to her life story to keep her from telling the world about an alleged affair with Trump, AMI swore up and down it wasn’t true. But it was true. In a press release following Cohen’s sentencing, the Justice Department announced that it had reached a non-prosecution agreement with the company for its role in Cohen and Trump’s payoff-as-campaign-contribution scheme. As part of that agreement, AMI admitted that “it made the $150,000 payment in concert with [Trump]’s presidential campaign, and in order to ensure that [McDougal] did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election.”
There’s nowhere to go but up—blink and you’ll miss what could be a very important clause in the announcement of AMI’s agreement. Khuzami wrote that, as part of the deal, AMI—whose Enquirer Trump famously praised as “Pulitzer-worthy”—cooperated with prosecutors, accepted responsibility, and pledged to “provide cooperation in the future.” In other words, Khuzami and his team may not be done charging people for their role in the mistress payouts.
Cohen is already headed to prison for three years for his role in orchestrating the hush money. AMI struck a deal. Who’s left to charge?
Trouble in Trump Org: The original criminal information, which cited internal communications between "Executive-1" and "Executive-2" at the Trump Organization, stated that the company reimbursed Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payment through a phony invoice servicing a nonexistent retainer agreement. One executive, Allen Weisselberg, even received limited immunity to testify against Cohen back in August. The Trump Organization was pleased enough with Cohen’s work that it gave him a $60,000 bonus for his hard work at the end of the year. But now officials there may have buyer’s remorse. The New York Times reported last week that federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been looking into officials in Trump Organization as part of the campaign finance investigation.
Even higher? Two people have laid out in court that Donald Trump played a central, leading role in orchestrating the hush-money payments that constituted a campaign finance crime: Michael Cohen and Khuzami. For anyone else, that would be a big warning that they could be similarly charged with a crime. Current Justice Department policy, however, prevents prosecutors from charging a sitting president. In theory, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan could charge Trump once he leaves office. If that happened, the irony would be especially bitter for Trump given that the case came from a prosecutor appointed by his own U.S. Attorney rather than Robert Mueller, the man he’d spent his presidency fuming about. But charging a former president for acts committed in office is untrodden constitutional territory and it’s not clear that prosecutors are eager to try and trod it.
Tricksy feds: On Tuesday night, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s lawyers dropped a lengthy, 178-page memo outlining why they think their client shouldn’t any prison time for lying to the FBI about his communications with Russian officials. The document reads like a bingo card for MAGA land’s most reviled scapegoats, like fired FBI officials Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok. In the defense’s telling, the judge should take Flynn’s lies to the FBI at a discount because McCabe and Strzok were thoroughly unsporting in not reminding the former three-star general and senior intelligence official that lying to the FBI is a crime. Needless to say, most people don’t get sound legal advice from the FBI agents investigating them for crimes and other generals charged with similar offenses haven’t pulled the ignorance defense.
Meddling, it’s not just for Russia: A Ukrainian court ruled on Wednesday that two officials there broke the law when they revealed that Manafort’s name and signature appeared on a secret ledger outlining payments from ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in August 2016. The revelation helped boot Manafort, already on thin ice, from his role as campaign chairman and added to the growing questions about Russia’s role in the Trump campaign. In addition to calling the leaks illegal, the Kiev district court said sharing them with the New York Times amounted to interference in the electoral processes” of America.
Officials in Ukraine probably aren’t too upset about the trouble the story caused Manafort. After all, the government there came to power only after sweeping Manafort clients in the pro-Russian Party of Regions out of power. But since Trump became president, Kiev can no longer afford to annoy him given the country’s dependence on American military aid to keep the Russians at bay. If Trump or his supporters want to turn the case into a talking point that the Republican nominee was a victim of foreign election interference in 2016, the fiercely anti-Russian government there probably won’t put up too much of a fuss.
