Part One – Cohen News Includes Steele Dossier Looks Accurate & Wild Day in Court

Steele Dossier Looking Very Credible If Cohen Went To Prague….

The seat keeps getting hotter for subjects/targets of the Mueller investigation, as we have recent news pertaining to the Steele dossier & Cohen in court Monday.  Some say the haul they got from Cohen’s office could be as much or more of a legal threat to Trump than the other side of the Mueller investigation: trump-sees-inquiry-into-cohen-as-greater-threat-than-mueller.  In addition to exposing campaign finance violations, hush money & threatening a potential witness, it opens up a whole can of worms on Trump’s shady & possibly illegal business dealings.  Plus it’s being investigated through a New York district, so it can press ahead no matter what kind of shenanigans Trump might pull to derail the Mueller probe.  Cohen has been closely tied in with many of Trump’s activities through the years.  He’s been under investigation for months, as federal authorities were originally tipped off by some red flags coming from banks around the world of suspicious transactions.  From a political standpoint, the evidence confiscated from Cohen about payoffs surrounding sex scandals &/or money trails revealing criminal business transactions, it piles onto the growing narrative of a president justifiably facing impeachment from Mueller’s impending findings in the Trump Russian scandal.

Cohen’s reported trip to Prague in summer 2016 further confirms details in the Steele dossier, a trip the Trump lawyer has repeatedly denied making, with the meeting there with Russians (including a top aide to Putin) points to likely collusion if Cohen did attend.  The echo has repeatedly tried to discredit the dossier for a long time now, which it’s steadily becoming proven much of what’s in there is true.  The “pee tape” mentioned in there has gotten a lot of attention, but it’s all the other stuff in the Steele dossier that holds so many legal dangers for Trump, directly pointing at that evidence of collusion which echo talking points have always claimed there was no evidence.  Maybe it’s time for echo-world to change their talking points, since in addition to solid evidence of obstruction by Trump, we also now see several instances of collusion by Trump close associates & family members, which Trump almost certainly would have known about.

If the latest reports do prove true that Cohen did indeed go to Prague, which he’s still denying, that could be the most significant development yet for Mueller building his case for collusion/conspiracy.  And with evidence like potential audio taped conversations between Cohen & Trump, plus following the money trail for payments such as the hackers of the DNC emails perhaps being compensated, there is a high probability Trump will be found to have been personally involved in whatever Cohen was doing.  And there’s a high probability he was up to no good.  Cohen was said to be Trump’s “fixer” & the raid did produce records about the Trump Organization, so the evidence gathered by the FBI could show a lot of nefarious things that were fixed.  Inside the link mueller-has-evidence-that-trump-lawyer-met-in-prague-with-russians-during-campaign-sources-say, McClatchy had reported this:

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election. It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the presidency.

Trump’s threats to fire Mueller or the deputy attorney general overseeing the investigation, Rod Rosenstein, escalated this week when the FBI raided Cohen’s home, hotel room and office Monday. The raid was unrelated to the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, but instead focused on payments made to women who have said they had sexual relationships with Trump. Cohen has denied for months that he ever has been in Prague or colluded with Russia during the campaign. Neither he nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.

It’s unclear whether Mueller’s investigators also have evidence that Cohen met with a prominent Russian – purportedly Konstantin Kosachev, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin –– in the Czech capital. Kosachev, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee of a body of the Russian legislature, the Federation Council, also has denied visiting Prague in 2016. This month, Kosachev was among 24 high-profile Russians whom the U.S. sanctioned in retaliation for Russia’s meddling.

But investigators have traced evidence that Cohen entered the Czech Republic through Germany, apparently in August or early September 2016 as the former spy reported, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Cohen wouldn’t have needed a passport for such a trip, because both countries are in the Schengen Area, in which 26 nations have open borders. The disclosure still left a puzzle: The sources did not say whether Cohen took a commercial flight or private jet to Europe, and gave no explanation of why no record of such a trip has surfaced.

More info on the significance if Cohen made that Prague trip, explained in this conclusion to michael-cohen-visiting-prague-would-be-a-huge-development-in-the-russia-investigation:

But this contradiction between a clear allegation from the Steele dossier and the assertion that it wasn’t true by Cohen and Trump helped drive the idea that the dossier was broadly discredited shortly after its release. Pick out the Prague trip and nothing that follows could have happened. Put the Prague trip back into the mix? A lot of the other parts of that allegation now become possible.* What’s more, it undermines the credibility of those who insisted that the claim was completely without merit. Look at it another way: If the central conceit of the Steele’s claim were accurate — that Cohen was working with agents of the Russian government directly to aid Trump’s candidacy — it would be very hard to argue that no collusion took place. That likely requires Cohen’s having been in Prague. This is our first significant indication that he might have been.

In the next group of links, Americans support the Mueller investigation by a nearly 3:1 margin: majority-of-americans-support-robert-muellers-trump-investigation-poll-says.  Those that don’t are no doubt doting Trumpeters, featuring those brainwashed by the echo into thinking it’s perfectly normal to have a potential criminal as our president.  All we know is the prez had better leave Rosenstein, Sessions & Mueller alone, so special counsel can continue this probe to its logical conclusion & the American people can learn the facts about what really happened.  As I’ve said in previous messages, any attempts to stop or limit the investigation, it would bring on a constitutional crisis, be immediate grounds for impeachment, & delegitimize Trump as our president.  There could be no other conclusion should a president stymie a probe that’s investigating him for crimes.  So it’s better Trump leave well enough alone till we know the truth.  As stated in the editorial president-above-rule-law, nobody is above the law!

From there we see a large group of links in the aftermath of the raid on Trump lawyer Cohen’s office, with the various legal problems that’s presenting for Cohen, as well as the news coming from court on Monday.  Naturally, as I mentioned above, that’s also putting the prez in even more serious legal jeopardy.  These excerpts from michael-cohen-and-the-end-stage-of-the-trump-presidency, we’re sensing as the evidence keeps piling up, we’re seeing the end is nigh.  SNL is funny & very relevant in this age of Trump, which we can only hope their opening skit from Saturday night plays out in real life.  It had character actors playing Pence & Sessions in an office, where Pence says in a couple months the president will be back to normal, cause it will be me.  As we’re watching this presidency crumble & soon fade into the night, Trumpeters can stop blaming the media, DOJ, FBI, deep state, Hillary, Obama or any of us who oppose him.  Trump has brought all this on himself:

This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.

 

However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigationsof his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations. The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.

 

There is no longer one major investigation into Donald Trump, focussed solely on collusion with Russia. There are now at least two, including a thorough review of Cohen’s correspondence. The information in his office and hotel room will likely make clear precisely how much the Trump family knew. What we already know is disturbing, and it is hard to imagine that the information prosecutors will soon learn will do anything but worsen the picture. Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.

In the group under international threats, I fully support air strikes like the Syria bombing in direct retaliation for human atrocities like we saw with those nerve gas attacks on their own people: the-strikes-on-syria-had-to-be-done.  Syria is going to think twice before using chemical weapons again.  And if they do, we hit them again even harder.  Getting congressional approval for the strikes would only have dragged out the process.  The overall battle against our enemies & terrorism is an ongoing battle we cannot retreat from, otherwise the forces of evil would be emboldened & given free reign to expand their heinous acts against humanity.

We may constantly be playing whack-a-mole with rogue states & terrorist organizations, but that’s much better than a long drawn-out, full-scale war where we commit tens of thousands of ground troops & try to engage in nation building.  Brutal dictatorships & terrorist organizations must be hit back when they commit atrocious murders through a coalition of freedom-loving nations, as what we did in Syria, or else the evil will only spread & become more powerful.  Also consider those threats can come from sources both external and internal.  Also in that same section of links, we find Trump is still terrified of imposing sanctions on Russia: trump-puts-the-brake-on-new-russian-sanctions-reversing-haleys-announcement.  What does Putin have on him?  Did Russia issue a threat to the White House after Haley announced sanctions?  Is this like a blackmail situation?

In the last group of links which further expose the shortcomings & shenanigans of a totally corrupt/unfit president, I provide these excerpts from rex-huppke-donald-trumps-presidency-is-collapsing.  This catastrophically dysfunctional presidency is surely collapsing under the weight of its self-induced mayhem, from which America needs it to collapse.  I truly believe he’s a con man running a criminal enterprise out of the White House, but we need to wait for the evidence to prove it.  Whenever Trump departs (perhaps this year), after a very rocky & bitter hyperpartisan period where Trumpeters would go ballistic, as long as we survive the shock of such a presidential transition, hopefully we can pick up the pieces & start over with a clean slate.  We need a new president who’ll serve the country, not just himself:

This is untenable. Every president winds up embroiled in some form of scandal, maybe even several. But the sheer volume of controversies consuming the Trump White House is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Some may be false, some may be exaggerated, some may be legitimate. But their very existence points to a president whose past should have disqualified him from office and whose temperament consistently leads him to trouble.

If we had President Jeb Bush or President Marco Rubio right now, there would be ample partisan squabbling and quite possibly a minor scandal or two. But I feel confident we wouldn’t have “pee tape” trending on Twitter. We wouldn’t have a special counsel closing in on the president or a series of salacious stories about questionable payoffs for past affairs. We wouldn’t have the home and office of the president’s personal attorney being raided by the FBI.

This is too much for Trump to shoulder and it’s too much for this country to maintain. And there’s a good chance that within moments of this column publishing there will be another scandal, and an hour later five more. Trump will never admit his presidency is collapsing. But it is, and fast.