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Originally Posted by u crank
And of course there are going to be a variety of opinions and we have just started to hear them.
Here's one from a guy who may actually know what he is talking about. Bradley A. Smith is a former Commissioner, Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2000 and 2005. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
This is an article by him in Wednesday's National Review. It is aptly titled 'Michael Cohen Pled Guilty to Something That Is Not a Crime'
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...n-finance-law/ |
As you said, the above article is just an opinion based on publicly known data and prior experiences. But does Smith have some 'inside' knowledge of the substance and extent of the SCO's investigation or is he, like the rest of us, going on what we got? I would rather doubt his knowledge of actual, specific dtat given how tightly reigned in the SCO is about releasing any data. And that is the gist of what I have been saying; when you hear Trump, his minions, or his Trumpettes rail against the SCO and claim everything coming out is false and they have no case, you have to take into account, other than their own obvious bias and mount desperate need fo self-preservation, they really don't know what cards the SCO is holding. A case in point is this regarding a new criminal investigation into another possible Trump screw-up:
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The reported investigation arose in part from materials that federal prosecutors seized in April when it raided the home of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was just sentenced to three years for lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws during Trump’s 2016 campaign when he coordinated payoffs to two women who had alleged affairs with Trump.
A source who spoke with the Journal said that during the Cohen raid, FBI officials obtained a recorded conversation between him and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser to Melania Trump who also worked on inaugural events. In it, she expressed concern about the committee’s spending, the Journal reported.
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Trump Inauguration Committee Under Criminal Investigation Over Spending: Report --
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0539b32132fe2
The full extent of what the SCO holds and knows is very uncertain. Who knows what the SCO has harvested from the records of the various participants in the scandals; and given how modern communications media (emails, tweets, DMs, etc.) has an extraordinarily long shelf life and/or are surprisingly easy to resurrect, the possibility the SCO has far more than publicly known is more of a high probability. Trump and his supporters are acting like the mess he's in is a binary process of just one issue and just one resolution when its really more like a web with many threads and intersections. Trump has been able to skate through his life of scams and duplicity because, as a private citizen, the general populace and, to a certain extent, the authorities gave him little or no notice, and, now, he's seeing how much genuine scrutiny a holder of the Oval Office must face, a situation an awful lot of people pointed out in articles posted well before his election. Basically, if Trump or his minions haven't each deleted, shredded, erased, burned, or, in some other manner disposed of possibly incriminating material before the investigations got under way, they are screwed; and they better hope that anyone they interacted with has likewise disposed of those materials...
Its not surprising at all the new campaign/inaugural investigation seems to have come from documents, etc., seized from Cohen; lawyers are notorious for saving everything and documenting everything as just part of their professional CYA SOP; and, remember Cohen was not only so cautious about documenting all transactions with Trump, he also recorded their phone conversations. Who knows: maybe he also recorded their face to face conversations, too?...
And, hey, how about that Maria Butina taking a plea today? Not looking good for the NRA and the GOP, PR-wise, hobnobbing with a now admitted Russian agent...
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