If you were watching Fox News when the Michael Cohen sentence came down, you would be pretty sure this was bad news for Donald Trump’s former fixer. Less clear was what it meant for the president himself.
For clarity on that, you would have had to wait a couple of hours until anchor Shepard Smith invited the reliably frank Judge Andrew Napolitano on his afternoon news hour to explain just how bad the day’s news was for Trump.
“We’ve learned that federal prosecutors here in New York City, not Bob Mueller and his team in Washington, D.C., career prosecutors here in New York City, have evidence that the president of the United States committed a felony by ordering and paying Michael Cohen to break the law,” the judicial analyst said. “How do we know that? They told that to a federal judge.”
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“Under the rules, they can’t tell that to a federal judge unless they actually have that hardcore evidence,” he continued. “Under the rules, they can’t tell that to a federal judge unless they intend to do something with that evidence.”
Now those same federal prosecutors have entered into an agreement with AMI, the National Enquirer’s parent company, “which ties a bow on all of this,” Napolitano added, “which connects the dots between the payments to the two women who claim they had intimate relationships with the president, and the line running through all of that is the president himself.”
“Prosecutors have told us through these filings that they have evidence that the president committed a felony?” Smith asked his guest.
“The felony is paying Michael Cohen to commit a felony,” Napolitano concluded. “It’s pretty basic.”
