“Two of those counts appear to relate to Trump directly. Cohen admitted on Tuesday to making payments to two women at the direction of an unidentified candidate for political office. Those payments, Cohen said, were made to influence the outcome of the election””
Sounds like something to worry about to me.
Every dollar spent on yard signs was meant to influence the election too. So what?
“were made to influence the outcome of the election”
Trump was expected to lose and the polls document that well.
“Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist on Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted Friday that the race is ‘steady,’ with a ‘Clinton advantage of 3 to 5 points.’”
“Donald Trump’s poll denialism”
October 14, 2016: 4:00 PM ET
https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/12/media/donald-trump-polls/index.html
It was only the unprecedented continued bias of the press that made Trump a winner by convincing more and more Democrats that they didn’t need to vote.
Well, the problem is, the “fact” in that statement is that the payments were made. Nobody seems to dispute that payments were made.
And it also seems clear that the reason for making payments before the election was to “influence” the election. (As other people have said, if Trump bought a new suit to wear to a rally, it could be said that the payment to the tailor was to “influence the election”).
Both women were paid for a service, specifically their silence.
We also know, as a fact, that Cohen received money back from Trump for these payments.
What is not actually a FACT, but rather an OPINION, is that a lawyer paying off someone not to speak is a “campaign contribution”. Cohen SAYS it was as part of a plea deal, but that is not something that the judicial system has determined yet. And a lot of good legal scholars have argued that you’d never get a conviction on that.
But he pled guilty to that because then he didn’t get charged with something a lot worse that he actually DID.
The court accepts the plea, which means the court doesn’t think it is an outrageous claim, but that doesn’t mean the court has determined that paying people is illegal.
Further, it is not a FACT that Cohen was “on the hook” for the payments, as he was a lawyer and doing a client’s bidding, and got reimbursed.
And it is NOT a crime, so far as I can tell, for a lawyer and a client to accept a bill as a way to reimburse, a bill that might indicate work that was not in fact done, unless that is done to HIDE some criminal enterprise. IN this case, the charge is that BECAUSE they did it the other thing became a crime.
And last, as a lawyer, Cohen would bear responsibility if he did something the wrong way and because of that HE violated the law. Trump telling him to pay off the women, and Cohen doing it in an illegal way, rather than getting the money from Trump first, would be his problem, not Trumps.
It is a very clever thing the democrat handling the Cohen case did, getting Cohen to plead guilty to things that were probably NOT criminal, in order to have a story that Trump ordered him to do something criminal.