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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2018 14:58:21 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n The hour of <\/span>4 pm Tuesday, potentially one of the most consequential hours<\/a> in the history of the American presidency, made clear that history books will almost certainly note Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s surprise 2016 election win with an asterisk.<\/p>\n Just minutes apart, in courtrooms in New York and outside Washington, DC, two of Trump\u2019s closest aides\u2014his longtime personal lawyer<\/a> and his former campaign chairman<\/a>\u2014became felons, as the former pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, and the latter was found guilty by a jury on eight other charges.<\/p>\n For the better part of two years, Trump has remained by all accounts obsessed with his narrow, unlikely campaign victory, bragging about his electoral college totals in numerous settings, including to foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin<\/a>, even as he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. Yet after Tuesday, the victory appears increasingly tainted, the American presidency as the spoils of ill-gotten gains, an election whose pivotal moments were shaped\u2014potentially decisively\u2014by Russian attacks overseas and hush money cover-ups at home.<\/p>\n After all, the question, following Tuesday\u2019s back-to-back bombshells, is no longer whether Trump\u2019s surprise victory was aided by criminal acts\u2014that much has been made clear both by Robert Mueller\u2019s sweeping indictments<\/a> against two dozen Russians, working for Vladimir Putin\u2019s military intelligence<\/a> as well as for the Internet Research Agency<\/a>, as well as by Michael Cohen\u2019s decision to plead guilty to campaign finance violations.<\/p>\n To state that more simply: At least two separate criminal conspiracies helped elect Donald Trump president in 2016, one executed by the Russian government, another by Trump\u2019s personal lawyer.<\/p>\n The questions now are how many different crimes aided the president\u2014and how closely and personally involved was Donald Trump himself?<\/p>\n Presumably that\u2019s a question that special counsel Robert Mueller has been studying for some time. The facts surrounding Michael Cohen\u2019s guilty pleas Tuesday were on Mueller\u2019s radar as early as November, according to public reports, although the investigation targeting him only became public in April when federal agents raided his home and office.<\/p>\n Trump himself brushed off the Manafort verdict Tuesday night, saying<\/a>, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t involve me,\u201d which is technically true but misses the huge implications for how the spiraling\u2014and growing\u2014investigation will unfold.<\/p>\n We\u2019re left, after Tuesday, with six big questions, both political and criminal:<\/p>\n How long does Paul Manafort go to prison?<\/strong> Manafort, who is already in jail after allegedly tampering with witnesses in his case, faces a stunning comedown: The 69-year-old political consultant, with a taste for a luxurious lifestyle that included ostrich jackets, appears unlikely to breathe another free breath. He faces as many as 80 years in prison after Tuesday\u2019s conviction, as well as another trial, set for next month in Washington, that could add perhaps as much as another century of prison time. Pending a presidential pardon\u2014which itself would surely set off a national political firestorm\u2014Paul Manafort is going to prison.<\/p>\n Given the breadth and depth of the charges against him, the fact that Manafort did not already strike a plea deal seems to indicate that he is not likely to attempt to cooperate now; however, evidence of cooperation could garner him a shorter sentence. Will he finally share what he knows\u2014or does he even know anything of value?<\/p>\n What will Michael Cohen say?<\/strong> Fixer Michael Cohen\u2019s guilty pleas did not come Tuesday with a cooperation agreement\u2014he is not obligated to speak with Robert Mueller\u2019s team\u2014but Cohen\u2019s lawyer, Lanny Davis, told<\/a> MSNBC last night, \u201cMr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.\u201d<\/p>\n After Tuesday, the victory appears increasingly tainted, the American presidency as the spoils of ill-gotten gains.<\/p>\n Yet it\u2019s hard to know how to read Cohen\u2019s plea deal coming without a cooperation agreement. Why would he start speaking now, rather than use what he knows as leverage up front with prosecutors? Does it mean that Cohen (a) refused to cooperate before, (b) doesn\u2019t actually have anything of value to tell prosecutors, or (c) that prosecutors feel they already have sufficient evidence regarding what Michael Cohen knows, and that his added testimony would be superfluous? Each of those scenarios has interesting and distinct impacts on the case against the president going forward.<\/p>\n Remember, the raid on Cohen\u2019s office netted prosecutors nearly 300,000 documents, a cache probably as close to any that could serve as a Rosetta Stone to understanding Trump\u2019s world and his decisionmaking.<\/p>\n What happens next with \u201cIndividual-1\u201d?<\/strong> Surely the most remarkable moment in Tuesday\u2019s legal drama came as Michael Cohen made clear, speaking in federal court in New York, that his actions to pay hush money in the final days of the 2016 election were directed by a \u201ccandidate for federal office\u201d and \u201cfor the purposes of influencing the election.\u201d<\/p>\n The court documents, while not naming Donald Trump, leave no doubt that the candidate, leave no doubt as to the identity of \u201cIndividual-1\u201d in Cohen's plea agreement: It refers to \u201cIndividual-1\u201d becoming President of the United States.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a point Lanny Davis made certain to emphasize<\/a>: \u201cToday he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election. If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn\u2019t they be a crime for Donald Trump?\u201d<\/p>\n There remains substantial legal uncertainty<\/a> about whether the President of the United States can be indicted in office\u2014although the question is not as settled<\/a> as Trump\u2019s allies have argued\u2014but as the nation wrestles with the implications of Tuesday\u2019s drama this stunning statement seems clear: If Donald J. Trump weren\u2019t president, he would likely have already been indicted.<\/p>\n Speaking yesterday after Cohen\u2019s historic guilty plea, the FBI\u2019s top agent in New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., offered a strong condemnation<\/a>, choosing words that seemed a carefully veiled warning to the president from an agency under daily fire from the Oval Office: \u201cAs we all know, the truth can only remain hidden for so long before the FBI brings it to light. We are all expected to follow the rule of law, and the public expects us\u2014the FBI\u2014to enforce the law equally.\u201d<\/p>\n Where does Robert Mueller go next?<\/strong> The special counsel\u2019s investigation today is the strongest it has been, buoyed by the victory against Manafort and\u2014perhaps\u2014the future cooperation of Cohen.<\/p>\n Mueller faces an increasingly angry, embattled president\u2014at war with the intelligence community<\/a> and the media<\/a>\u2014and Mueller\u2019s team is under increasing personal assault from the presidential Twitter account, which just this week has called Mueller\u2019s team \u201cthugs\u201d and said the investigation is \u201cdisgraced and discredited.\u201d Meanwhile, \u201cWitch Hunt\u201d tweets have become an almost daily phenomenon. Trump this week even went so far as to suggest that he could run the investigation himself<\/a>, as if the normal functioning of judicial independence and the rule of law was just another personal presidential prerogative.<\/p>\n The president\u2019s allies will surely try to spin that Mueller fell short in the case against Manafort, given that he was convicted on fewer than half of the overall charges. And surely the aggressive type-A prosecutors on the team<\/a>, like Andrew Weissmann, would have liked an across-the-board victory on all 18 counts. But the jury\u2019s verdict was still a resounding win for Mueller. His team has been tested in court, the evidence weighed by a jury of ordinary citizens, and they won convictions in every area of criminal conduct they charged: bank fraud, tax fraud, and failure to disclose a foreign bank account.<\/p>\n 'If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn\u2019t they be a crime for Donald Trump?'<\/p>\n Lanny Davis, Cohen's Lawyer<\/p>\n Thus far, Mueller has carefully established the corners of the conspiracy around Trump\u2019s campaign and Russia\u2019s attack: The social media campaign of the Internet Research Agency<\/a>, the active cyberattacks by the GRU intelligence service<\/a>, the campaign and transition contacts with Russians by people like George Papadopoulos<\/a> and Michael Flynn<\/a>, and then the money laundering and sketchy business contacts of Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.<\/p>\n Future indictments surely will fill in the gaps between those corners, connecting the dots from one to another. So what lies in between, and what\u2019s on Mueller\u2019s radar next?<\/p>\n The fact that Manafort\u2019s trials have remained part of Mueller\u2019s probe all along appears to indicate that Mueller sees a direct connection between Manafort\u2019s Ukrainian business dealings and Russia\u2019s conspiracy against the presidential election. In all other areas, including in Michael Cohen\u2019s case, Mueller has handed off \u201cunrelated\u201d prosecutions to other investigators, including referring both Cohen\u2019s case and other lobbyists<\/a> caught up with Manafort to the Southern District of New York.<\/p>\n There remain numerous open questions in the Mueller investigation. I outlined nine of them last month<\/a>. Since then, we know, Mueller has continued to pursue the investigation around Roger Stone, with more testimony<\/a> to come in early September. We know too, from the Manafort trial, that prosecutors have been talking with Manafort\u2019s aide Rick Gates<\/a> about a broader range of Russian contacts around the election. At the same time, new sentencing documents<\/a> released about George Papadopoulos appear to change his role in the case. While he\u2019s been long believed to have cooperated closely with Mueller, it appears that\u2019s not the case and that, in fact, his early stonewalling cost the FBI a chance to focus on the mysterious professor Joseph Mifsud, who appears to have been a Russian conduit.<\/p>\n What other investigations\u2014and crimes\u2014are out there that we don\u2019t know about?<\/strong> It appears increasingly clear that the circles around the president are filled with myriad\u2014and often mundane\u2014criminal behavior.<\/p>\n Yesterday, all but buried under the headlines from Cohen and Manafort, federal investigators also indicted GOP congressman Duncan Hunter for misusing campaign funds<\/a>. The investigation had entirely nothing to do with Donald Trump except for this: Hunter was the second congressman to endorse Trump\u2019s then-longshot presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the first congressman to endorse Trump, representative Chris Collins, was indicted just last week, on charges of insider trading<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the president\u2019s national security advisor, Michael Flynn, has already pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators, a charge that included Flynn\u2019s illegal work as an unregistered foreign agent for the Turkish government. Manafort\u2019s deputy, Rick Gates, similarly, has pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges. It seems hard to imagine that Cohen would have pleaded guilty so quickly if \u201call\u201d he faced was the campaign finance violation\u2014instead, he was hit with years of damning tax fraud, too, dating back well before the presidential campaign ever started.<\/p>\n That simple fact that so many people around Trump are engaged in their own illegal activity, often unrelated to Trump himself, provides federal investigators enormous leverage when it comes to getting answers about the questions that they do care about regarding the president\u2019s actions.<\/p>\n Similarly, we continue to be surprised by events that appear perhaps tangentially related to the Russia probe, like the arrest of alleged Russian spy Maria Butina<\/a> and her years-long effort to cultivate sources inside the NRA and the conservative movement.<\/p>\n Moreover, Russia\u2019s attacks on American democracy have not ceased. In Tuesday's whirlwind of news, the day began with word that Microsoft had seized and shut down<\/a> a number of Russian-linked websites aimed at attacking presidential critics and candidates in the midterm elections.<\/p>\n When does this cross over from the courts to politics?<\/strong> The questions around the president have always been political, not criminal. The Constitution allows for impeaching a president for \u201chigh crimes and misdemeanors\u201d but leaves that phrase wonderfully, ambiguously undefined. A crime, in short, can be almost anything Congress decides it to be.<\/p>\n This is a political reality that the president\u2019s TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, understands inherently: His increasingly far-fetched arguments on cable news, how it\u2019s impossible to separate fact from opinion and how \u201ctruth isn\u2019t truth<\/a>,\u201d are aimed less at a courtroom\u2014where Giuliani himself had no trouble separating facts from opinion when he was one of the nation\u2019s most famous federal prosecutors\u2014than at reassuring President Trump\u2019s allies on Capitol Hill, and in the GOP writ large, not to abandon hope.<\/p>\n Thus the question for lawmakers\u2014and for an electorate looking ahead to congressional ballots in November\u2014is whether anything that\u2019s happened this week changes the political calculus around backing the president?<\/p>\n It seems hard to imagine that if the personal lawyer of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton had just pleaded guilty to paying hush money to a porn star in the days before the presidential election\u2014and said, under oath, that Obama or Clinton had directed the payment be made\u2014that speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, or the chair of the House oversight committee would sit quietly on the sidelines. Yet, for now, GOP lawmakers appear to believe that supporting the president remains good politics.<\/p>\n In fact, Republican senator Lindsey Graham all but explicitly endorsed any presidential crime short of actual treason Tuesday night, saying<\/a>, \u201cCampaign finance violations, I don\u2019t know what will come from that, but the thing that will hurt the President the most is if, in fact, his campaign did coordinate with a foreign government like Russia. Anything short of that is probably going to fall into partisan camps.\u201d<\/p>\n What, if anything, will change that belief is the biggest unknown in American politics today.<\/p>\n