All the President’s men

Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen's stories shook Donald Trump's government

Two minutes. That is the span of time that separated two news stories that shook Donald Trump’s world. First it was Michael Cohen — Trump’s long time ‘fixer’ who had once said he’d do ‘anything’ for Donald Trump — pleading guilty before a federal court to violating campaign finance laws. Then, it was Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, who was convicted of tax fraud. This news would send Trump’s already volatile Twitter feed into pandemonium: Jeff Sessions was blamed for not doing his job (which according to Trump involves obstruction of justice); the ‘witch-hunt’ rhetoric was ratcheted up; Hilary Clinton’s email debacle was regurgitated for the umpteenth time. Arguably, never before had Trump’s grasp on the most powerful office in America looked so fragile.

In many ways, the conviction of Michael Cohen is a realisation of some of Trump’s worst fears. Trump yearns for undying loyalty from his staff, unsurprisingly seeing the epitome of this in Roy Cohn, the attorney better known for being the chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy in the actual communist ‘witch-hunts’ that took place in the 1950s. In a January 2018 article The New York Times reported that Trump often asked his staff: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn was a man who didn’t think twice about actually doing ‘anything’ for his clients — even if it was unethical. In Trump’s mind that is what a lawyer and a member of the President’s staff should be willing to do: find a way to protect the President and not worry about rules and procedure. But Trump never got such loyalty; not from James Comey, then director of the FBI; not from Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General; and now, not from Michael Cohen.

To understand the impact of Cohen’s guilty plea we have to go back to Stormy Daniels. It was alleged that Cohen paid Daniels hush money to cover up an affair. According to campaign finance law in the United States, this makes Cohen liable for two different crimes: the first is that any individual contribution made to a candidate in excess of $2,700 is considered illegal (Daniels was allegedly paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen who was then reimbursed on the back of fake invoices by the Trump Organisation). The second is one that prohibits corporations from directly contributing to a campaign (the only way to do this is through other entities like PACs).

Why should this worry Trump you might ask? Isn’t Cohen the one pleading guilty? Here’s the kicker: Michael Cohen has admitted under oath in court that he did so at Donald Trump’s direction, with Trump having full knowledge of the facts.

What does this mean for Trump? Well, according to longstanding Justice Department guidelines Trump can’t be prosecuted while he is in office. The Justice Department could go the Nixon route and make him an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the Cohen case, but if you’re a Democrat you’re probably looking at the Constitution and thinking of another route: Impeachment.

The United States Constitution states that a President can be impeached on the basis of treason, bribery, or ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’. Cohen’s guilty plea establishes that Trump conspired with him to commit criminal acts for the purposes of influencing an election for Federal office. With Cohen’s tape recordings of meetings with Donald Trump regarding the payments having surfaced, Congress may have sufficient evidence to trigger impeachment proceedings. As columnist Bret Stephens noted ‘breaking the law to conceal an affair’ should certainly be an impeachable offence. The sentiment was echoed and endorsed on Twitter by Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe. But if Democrats really want to take the impeachment route with Donald Trump they may have to tolerate Donald Trump a bit longer simply because they don’t have the numbers for a conviction in the Senate. Things may change though in November when America votes in its mid-term elections.

But even Republicans cannot blindly stay loyal to Trump in the midst of his lies, bigotry and conspiracy to commit criminal actions. Republicans should think long and hard whether they want to be Trump’s Roy Cohn because it would mean abandoning all sense of morality to support one of the worst Presidents in America’s history. Trump’s election has displayed the worst parts of democracy, but if his reign of chaos is corrected, if he is impeached or forced to leave office, it will show to the world that democracy — when working right — can recover and rectify its mistakes.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 28^th, 2018.

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