I have been relatively quiet over the summer as the barrage of Trump news continues to come. It seemed to me as if there was nothing to be said that had not been said somewhere by someone. Since I was weary of hearing it, I didn't want to add to it all myself.
Then, at the beginning of the Manafort trial I did something I had long been promising myself I would do. I went to the website for the Special Counsel and downloaded the indictment. After reading it, what was going on became crystal clear, and it wasn't what I was hearing from the punditry.
Even though I am careful with the media I consume I found that I was getting the wrong idea. I was buying into this motion that this is a big "us vs. them" game with everyone who choosing sides and lining up for conflict. Mueller wants to defeat Trump. Trump wants to defeat Mueller. The winner gets a trophy and the title until next round.
No. These are people doing their jobs, and they don't have anything against Trump, or Manafort, or Cohen or any of these guys that they also don't have against anyone about whom they find evidence of criminal wrong-doing. This isn't political. The public discussion around it certainly is, but the trials, motions and pleas are just the law working.
Paul Manafort is a white-collar criminal who got way out ahead of his skis as he made a tremendous amount of money being far overpaid for the work he was doing. He came to believe that someone who could pull in $360,000+ a month for basically helping the Ukraine government with western press relations was untouchable in so many other ways. He was hanging around with people who lived and worked in countries without a functioning legal system, at least not for those at the top, and he seemed to lose sight of the fact that this wasn't the case in the US.
Basically, what he did was stash a bunch of money away in foreign bank accounts and then use that money, by direct wire transfer, to pay for outlandishly expensive personal items and real estate. He never reported the money as income, the money never came ashore in the US until it was transferred to someone else's bank account, often as payment for services rendered or good purchased.
He's a tax cheat. It wasn't enough to make huge amounts of income, he also wanted to cheat us all, as US citizens, out of the taxes he owes as a US citizen. This is what the jury nailed him on.
He is also a profligate spender, immature, greedy, boorish and just an all-around douche-bag of the kind that give rich people bad names. He took on the role as campaign manager in a desperate attempt to get himself out of serious financial trouble by putting himself in position to sell influence and information to the people he owed money to, mainly wealthy foreign businessmen with money-making interests affected by US foreign policy.
It failed. No one believed Trump would win, so the kind of access and information he had to peddle wasn't worth enough at the time he could make it available to the people who might find it valuable. Then, because the US govt was spying on his Russian business partners as a part of a counter-intelligence operation, his cover got blown and the Trump crime family shuffled him out the door.
You might remember that the main argument for the defense was that none of this ever would have come to light if it wasn't for his association with Trump. That's a reasonable supposition, but no one can know for sure. I feel that once he tried to subvert the political process for his own ends he gave up the ability to rely upon obscurity for protection from prosecution.
Why do no pundits make this point?
Cohen's case is actually all about the Taxi business. He and Manafort are peas in a pod. The difference is that Manafort used Ukraine as his ATM while Cohen used the people he leased Taxi medallions to as his ATM. The punditry keeps harping on about the payments to Trump's partners in adultery as the big deal here, but it's not. That's just what got Trump involved. Cohen was a complete Machiavellian dick-head who manipulated his Taxi medallion business partners into usurious loans and impossible payment binds.
That $18 you pay to ride uptown to see me in Harlem in a yellow? A big part of that isn't going to the driver as a wage, or to the cost of operating the cab, it's going to the guy who owns the medallion. Michael Cohen was that guy. It all fell apart with Uber.
That led to the split with his partner, which led to his legal problems. Unlike Manafort, these chickens very likely would have come home to roost for Cohen anyway. The bottom dropped out of the business. Medallions that used to be worth a million dollars were going for twenty cents on the dollar. That's not Mueller's, or even SDNY's doing. It's Uber.
People were going to owe money they couldn't repay. Cohen hid a $14M line of credit from other banks while he was trying to secure loans to bail him out. He used the same medallions as collateral for those loans that he used to secure the secret line of credit. He's a liar, a fraud, and a while collar criminal who jumped at the chance to try his hand at enriching himself though public corruption and influence peddling once the opportunity because available because of Trump's surprise win in the electoral college.
The payments to Ms. MacDougal and Ms. Clifford are just chum for the cable news fish. Yes, it was illegal, but it's a bit of a stretch to be so concerned about this kind of thing in a midst of a system that allows the Koch brothers to purchase political influence freely. It's a bit like getting upset with a college coach for buying a plane ticket for a NCAA recruit's Mom to see a game. The rules are nonsense anyway.
But, the taxi medallion stuff? Straight up crime, with real victims: taxpayers, taxi drivers, taxi customers. He should sit in jail for all that.
That's why he pleaded. They had him dead to rights. He lied on his taxes, he lied to banks, he effed-over everyone who trusted him.. He doesn't care about the Truth or protecting anyone from Trump.
So, that's why no rush to a cooperation agreement. Nailing Trump is not in his sights. Staying out of jail is. He's not John Dean
It is very comforting to have the world make sense to me. I got here by reading the court documents. You can too. I encourage it.
