UNDER OATH, President Donald Trump’s fixer and long-time personal lawyer Michael Cohen surrendered to the FBI and pleaded guilty to eight counts related to tax fraud, excessive campaign contributions, making false statements to a financial institution, and unlawful corporate contributions at a court hearing in New York on Tuesday, August 21.
Trump has been implicated in two of these counts of the crime that the president has been denying and lying about since this was reported by media he has been calling “fake news.”
THIS IS NOT FAKE NEWS.
Cohen admitted — under oath in an open court, substantiated with hard evidence, to be corroborated by other evidence pursuant to the rule of law — that he paid hush money to two women (Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal) in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate running for federal office (Donald Trump) to influence the outcome of the election.
These payments were made to silence these women about their alleged affairs with then-private citizen Trump just before the 2016 elections in order to conceal material information to the public to help him win the presidency.
As CNBC reported, “Cohen pleaded guilty to one count of causing an illegal corporate contribution in 2016 by working with the CEO of a media company, at the direction of a federal candidate for federal election, to keep information from the public. Cohen said he paid a woman $150,000 ‘for the principal purpose of influencing the election.’”
The second admission implicating Trump was “making an excessive campaign contribution. He said he used a company under his control to pay $130,000 to a woman at the direction of the same candidate.”
Trump refused to comment when reporters asked him about this news, but just responded to the other news of the day headlining his former campaign manager Paul Manafort who was found guilty on eight criminal counts by a jury in Virginia.
This is the first to come as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump win.
“I think the whole Manafort trial is very sad…I think it’s a very sad day for our country,” the president said at the White House. “He happens to be a very good person, and I think it’s very sad what they’ve done to Paul Manafort.”
The questions:
What will now happen to President Donald Trump? Will he also be indicted for the crime Cohen pleaded guilty to? After all, this criminal act was meant to benefit Trump, not Cohen.
What did the president’s men and women in the White House and in the Republican Party know about this? Were they ordered by Trump to conceal this from the public? Would this constitute obstruction of justice? Were they complicit in covering up this violation as they continued to lie to the American people?
And now that this has come out under oath in court, what will the honorable men and women of the Republican Party do to prove to the American people that the party of Lincoln believes in the rule of law, and that no one — not even the president — is above the law?
How would this development be part of the bigger picture of the Mueller probe? How does the evidence coming from this relate to the other pieces of evidence already in the hands of Mueller?
How will this news affect the 2018 midterm elections?
ABANGAN…
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Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www.facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
