Mark Penn is a Democrat, not a Republican. He is a pollster at Harvard. He was a pollster for Hillary. He has deep ties to the Clintons in the nineties. He’s always been perceived as a loyal Democrat. He runs a polling unit at Harvard now that is fairly reputed, very highly reputed and considered to be accurate. I heard this article referenced today on Rush Limbaugh’s show, he was quoting from it, so I went directly to the source. NB
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Cohen's plea deal is prosecutor's attempt to set up Trump
By Mark Penn, opinion contributor — 08/22/18

Here we go, from Russia with love to campaign finance with love.

Why was Michael Cohen investigated? Because the “Steele dossier” had him making secret trips to meet with Russians that never happened, so his business dealings got a thorough scrubbing and, in the process, he fell into the special counsel’s Manafort bin — the bin reserved for squeezing until the juice comes out. And now we are back to 1998 all over again, with presidents and presidential candidates covering up their alleged marital misdeeds and prosecutors trying to turn legal acts into illegal ones by inventing new crimes.

The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals of Trump meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who doesn’t try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump (while acting as his lawyer) to corporations for millions of dollars, and didn’t pay taxes on millions.

The sweetener for the prosecutors, of course, was getting Cohen to plead guilty to campaign finance violations that were not campaign finance violations. Money paid to people who come out of the woodwork and shake down people under threat of revealing bad sexual stories are not legitimate campaign expenditures. They are personal expenditures. That is true for both candidates we like and candidates we don’t. Just imagine if candidates used campaign funds instead of their own money to pay folks like Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about affairs; they would get indicted for misuse of campaign funds for personal purposes and for tax evasion.
There appear to be two payments involved in this unusual plea — Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for having “coordinated” the American Media Inc. payment to Karen McDougal for her story, not for actually making the payment. So he is pleading guilty over a corporate contribution he did not make.

Think about this for a minute: Suppose ABC had paid Stormy Daniels for her story in coordination with Michael Avenatti or maybe even the Democratic National Committee’s law firm on the eve of the election; by this reasoning, if the purpose of this money paid, just before the election, would be to hurt Trump and help Clinton win, this payment would be a corporate political contribution. If using it not to get Trump would be a corporate contribution, then using it to get Trump also has to be a corporate contribution. That’s why neither are corporate contributions and this is a bogus approach to federal election law. (Note that none of the donors in the 2012 John Edwards case faced any legal issues and the Federal Election Commission [FEC] ruled their payments were not campaign contributions that had to be reported — facts that prosecutors tried to suppress at trial.)

Now, when it comes to Stormy Daniels, Cohen made a payment a few days before the election that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani says was reimbursed. First, given that this payment was on Oct. 27, it would never have been reported before the election campaign and so, for all intents and purposes, was immaterial as it relates to any effect on the campaign. What’s clear in this plea deal is that, in exchange for overall leniency on his massive tax evasion, Cohen is pleading guilty to these other charges as an attempt to give prosecutors what they want — a Trump connection.

The usual procedures here would be for the FEC to investigate complaints and sort through these murky laws to determine if these kinds of payments are personal in nature or more properly classified as campaign expenditures. And, on the Daniels payment that was made and reimbursed by Trump, it is again a question of whether that was made for personal reasons (especially since they have been trying since 2011 to obtain agreement). Just because it would be helpful to the campaign does not convert it to a campaign expenditure. Think of a candidate with bad teeth who had dental work done to look better for the campaign; his campaign still could not pay for it because it’s a personal expenditure.

Contrast what is going on here with the treatment of the millions of dollars paid to a Democratic law firm which, in turn, paid out money to political research firm Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele without listing them on any campaign expenditure form — despite crystal-clear laws and regulations that the ultimate beneficiaries of the funds must be listed. This rule was even tightened recently. There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure, and yet, no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm, Fusion GPS or Steele. Reason: It does not “get” Trump.

So, Trump spends $130,000 to keep the lid on a personal story and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney–client privilege to the wind. Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs.

Remember that the feds tried a similar strategy against Democrat John Edwards in the 2012 case and it failed. As Gregory Craig, a lawyer who worked both for President Clinton and Edwards, said: “The government’s theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. It is novel and untested. There is no civil or criminal precedent for such a prosecution.” Hey, tried it there anyway and it failed.

And let’s not forget that Clinton was entrapped into lying about his affairs and, although impeached, was acquitted by the Senate. The lesson was clear: We are not going to remove presidents for lying about who they had affairs with, nor even convict politicians on campaign finance violations for these personal payments.

With Cohen pleading guilty, there will be no test of soundness of the prosecution theories here, and it is yet another example of the double standards of justice of one investigation that gave Clinton aides and principals every benefit of the doubt and another investigation that targeted Trump people until they found unrelated crimes to use as leverage. Prosecutors thought nothing of using the Logan Act against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and, now, obscure and unsettled elements of campaign finance law against Trump lawyer Cohen to manufacture crimes in what is a naked attempt to take Trump down and defeat democracy.

Donald Trump should do a better job of picking aides who pay their taxes — but he’s not responsible for their financial problems and crimes. These investigations, essentially based on an opposition-funded dossier, were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down. That’s why so many of his aides, lawyers and actions in the campaign and in the White House have undergone hour-by-hour scrutiny to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia-collusion theory as the fake pretext it was. Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, not a campaign contribution as commonly understood or ruled upon by the FEC — and squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does not change those facts.

Mark Penn is a managing partner of the Stagwell Group, a private equity firm specializing in marketing services companies, as well as chairman of the Harris Poll and author of “Microtrends Squared.” He served as pollster and adviser to President Clinton from 1995 to 2000, including during Clinton’s impeachment.

http://thehill.com/opinion/whi...empt-to-set-up-trump

By getting Cohen to plead guilty to charges that are not crimes just to disparage President Trump.Mueller is using the power of the government to influence future elections.

quote:

Originally posted by wcb6092:
By getting Cohen to plead guilty to charges that are not crimes just to disparage President Trump.Mueller is using the power of the government to influence future elections.

Yep. If this isn't election tampering, I don't no what is.

It was a smart and clever tactic of the Special Prosecutors to have Cohen plead guilty to the campaign finance violation. They knew they could never bring the charge to trial because it is a big loser, but it was a simple matter to tell Cohen that he needed to plead guilty to it as part of his agreement. Cohen was facing decades in prison on the tax and fraud charges (which were unrelated to Trump), so it was an easy sell to say to Cohen "plead guilty to the campaign finance charge and get 4-5 years or we'll go to trial on the other charges and you risk what would basically be a life sentence."

The flip side is that it is a bit of a sleazy maneuver that makes the Special Prosecutor look more and more like a partisan project aimed not at justice but at just getting Trump any way they can.

Yeah, that does seem a little naked, doesn't it?

Krazeehorse...that was a great article, thanks.

What we are witnessing is hard to believe.

This special prosecutor is making President Trump so toxic that no one will want to get within a mile of him, less they end up having their life put under a microscope.

We're watching in real time an organized effort to bring this president down, by any means possible. While the MSM cheers them on.

Thanks for posting that Article.

It addresses many of my concerns about the Cohen plea.

My wife asked me over dinner last night what 'campaign finance' violations Cohen committed and how Trump was involved if at all.

I couldn't give her a good explanation. Nothing I said made sense. Now I have a much better grip on why it doesn't make sense.

This is an Andrew Weissman charge.

Weissman led the Enron task force which ended up having all the charges dismissed after convictions of many lower ranking employees, and the indictment of Arthur Andersen for what was eventually determined to be not a crime at all.

quote:

One of the fundamental responsibilities of a prosecutor is to charge defendants only with conduct that is clearly criminal. And yet, time and again in these high-profile prosecutions, the United States Department of Justice charged multiple defendants with crimes that simply weren’t crimes. In addition to the so-called crime that destroyed Arthur Andersen, the Supreme Court held in rapid succession that the government had obtained convictions in three other cases where the charged conduct wasn’t criminal.

“Licensed to Lie” Sidney Powell

Mark Penn’s presentation of this vicious assault on President Trump is superbly coherent.

Now being reported that David Pecker, National Inquirer, has immunity from prosecution.

This is how they hope to block Kavanaugh.

^^^^^^
Could you please elucidate?

EXCELLENT insights in that article!
THanks.