If revenge is a dish best served cold, then the accusations made by former Trump attorney — and, lest you forget, the former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — Michael Cohen late this week has President Trump and his GOP enablers shivering in their boots right now.
Cohen — who has been making every effort to cooperate in the multiple federal investigations into the malfeasance of the president in an attempt to reduce his own sentence after pleading guilty to bank fraud, tax evasion, and campaign finance violations in relation the hush money payments paid to Trump’s sex star mistresses, implicating his former boss in the process as the instigator of the criminal behavior — announced on Thursday that he had discovered a hard drive among the materials returned to him after being seized by the FBI during their investigation into the charges against him.
Dangling the contents of the hard drive — said to contain 14 million files including “e-mails, voice recordings, images, and attachments from Mr. Cohen’s computers and phones” — as a carrot to House Democrats finally in a position to investigate President Trump, Cohen’s attorneys Lanny Davis, Michael Monico, and Carly Chocron revealed some information in a bid to help keep their client out of prison that could help explain why Republican politicians have been so vociferously defending the president.
In a blockbuster allegation that indicates that foreign influence in the 2016 elections could extend far beyond just Russia and the more recent allegations of Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern nations, a memo from Cohen’s lawyers says that their evidence includes details of “possible federal campaign finance violations by the Republican National Committee, including possibly illegal conduiting of illegal substantial donations to the RNC by foreign nationals, including from China.”
While details of Cohen’s role in his post-election position as deputy finance chairman of the RNC are sparse to date, that role would have given him unique insight into GOP fundraising and the prospect of unveiling foreign donations to the campaigns of Republicans beyond that of Trump himself could be devastating to the careers of any party members found to be involved.
With Trump in the process of finalizing a new trade deal with China in the next month, the timing of Cohen’s revelations could not be better positioned to instill fear in the president and his GOP cohorts.
You can read the entirety of the 133-page memo detailing the evidence that Cohen’s attorneys are willing to submit to Congressional committees investigating Trump and the 2016 campaign here. Until the Mueller report is released in full, it’s the closest we’ll come to seeing some of the most incriminating materials related to President Trump and his associates’ allegedly criminal actions.
Read it and make your own decisions as to whether Attorney General Barr was justified in his decision to let Trump go scot-free.
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Original reporting by Matthew Chapman at RawStory.
