The Michael Cohen Sentencing

[exotix]

I am where I have always been. Crooked Hillary should have a real investigation followed by a real indictment, a real trial, a real conviction, and real jail time.

How do you continue to live in a delusion given what just happened ?

[MisterVeritis]

I am where I have always been. Crooked Hillary should have a real investigation followed by a real indictment, a real trial, a real conviction, and real jail time.

How do you continue to live in a delusion given what just happened?

Today is Wednesday. By Friday there will be a new breathless revelation and this one will be placed on the back burner.

Concerning Crooked Hillary, we should have justice.

[stjames1_53]

Trumpf will be indicted, impeached, convicted and sentenced to prison .... duh.

oooh so cutesy with the incorrect name spelling
who is this Trumpf you keep spouting off about?

[exotix]

I am where I have always been. Crooked Hillary should have a real investigation followed by a real indictment, a real trial, a real conviction, and real jail time.

Today is Wednesday. By Friday there will be a new breathless revelation and this one will be placed on the back burner.

Concerning Crooked Hillary, we should have justice.

Good luck with your ongoing delusions ... LOL




Michael Flynn to be sentenced Dec. 18.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/u...cing-memo.html

https://nypost.com/2018/12/12/michae...-russia-probe/

[MisterVeritis]

Good luck with your ongoing delusions ... LOL
Michael Flynn to be sentenced Dec. 18.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/u...cing-memo.html
https://nypost.com/2018/12/12/michae...-russia-probe/

What do you believe will be significant?

Would you like my reasonable answer?

From my perspective, this is yet another clue that the Mueller witch hunt has nothing. If the Mueller witch hunt had something they would wait until after Flynn testifies at the (something) trial before sentencing him.

[Peter1469]

Cohen evaded paying appropriate income taxes. He got caught. He got convicted.

Got sentenced to 3 years. (Have no idea if that was high of low by conventional standards.)


Anyone getting excited about this event from a political "Trump sucks" perspective is prolly reading way too much into it. So far this is just a personal Cohen issue.

It was a downward deviation from the sentencing guidelines for what he plead to.

[exotix]

What do you believe will be significant?

Would you like my reasonable answer?

From my perspective, this is yet another clue that the Mueller witch hunt has nothing. If the Mueller witch hunt had something they would wait until after Flynn testifies at the (something) trial before sentencing him.

You mean like I ForGotti ?

LOL

[Tahuyaman]

This thread actually had some potential, but as usual exo threw it in the ditch.

[MMC]

*Breaking*

Ahahahahaha…..fell for the okie doke didn't ya EXO.

Trump’s Ex-Lawyer Didn’t Violate Campaign Finance Laws, and Neither Did the President.....


President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, may have been convinced by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to plead guilty to a supposed violation of campaign finance law, but that doesn’t mean that what happened is actually a federal crime.


In fact, neither the Federal Election Commission—which is the independent agency tasked with enforcing the Federal Election Campaign Act—nor its former commissioners would likely agree with the overaggressive view that the Southern District is taking. Indeed, the Southern District’s aggressive stance on this issue might have violated the Justice Department’s own policy.


Robert Khuzami, the acting U.S. attorney standing in for Geoffrey Berman, who has recused himself from the Cohen case, says in the government’s sentencing memorandum that Cohen committed a campaign finance violation by arranging payments from corporations to two women—Woman-1 and Woman-2 (Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, respectively), who claimed they had affairs with Trump—in order to buy their silence. Cohen eventually invoiced the Trump Organization for the Daniels payment.


Khuzami asserts these were illegal corporate contributions to the Trump campaign because they were made with “the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election.” Thus, he claims, they were campaign-related expenses and all of the rules governing federal campaigns apply to the payments.


State and Federal Authorities have reached an agreement with CEO Peckerhead of the National Enquirer ... that the payments to Stormy Daniels and Playmate McDougal and the stories killed by The National Enquirer were done for the purpose to influence the 2016 election …



First, his theory that anything intended to “influence” an election is a campaign-related expense fails to take into account the statutory limitation on this definition. FECA (52 U.S.C. 30114 (b)(2)) specifically says that campaign-related expenses do not include any expenditures “used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign.”


These payments were relatively small given Trump’s net worth—the kind of nuisance settlement that celebrities often make to protect their reputations, especially when faced with claims that will cost far more to defend than making a quick payoff without all of the bad publicity that usually accompanies such cases. Given Trump’s celebrity status, the potential liability to these women existed “irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign.”


As Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has said, the payment to Daniels was made “to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the president’s family” and “it would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”


The fact that a jury did not convict Edwards would not ordinarily mean that the government did not have a viable claim that a defendant violated the law. But consider this. Edwards had two former chairmen of the Federal Election Commission on retainer—Scott Thomas and Robert Lenhard—who were prepared to testify that, in their opinion, such payments to a mistress are not campaign-related expenses. Brad Smith, another former chairman of the commission, has similarly said that the hush money paid by Cohen is not a campaign-related expense.


And this wasn’t just their opinion—it was also the opinion of the Federal Election Commission. How do we know? Because as the chief financial officer for the Edwards campaign testified, when the Federal Election Commission audited the campaign, it determined that these payments were not campaign-related expenses that needed to be reported or run through the campaign. Thus, the commission said the federal rules governing campaign contributions and expenditures did not apply.


It is true that Justice Department prosecutors are not necessarily bound by the commissioners’ interpretation of the Federal Election Campaign Act. But according to the Justice Department handbook on election crimes, “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses,” the prosecution of all campaign finance crimes must be coordinated with the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division in Washington, D.C.


As Donsanto said, the role of the Justice Department in prosecuting cases under the Federal Election Campaign Act is “confined to prosecuting violations of the act’s provisions that are committed ‘knowingly and willfully.’” For a criminal violation to occur, “the application of the law to the facts of a matter must at the very least be clear, and there must be no doubt that the [Federal Election] Commission considers that the underlying conduct presents a [Federal Election Campaign Act] offense. That is not the case here.”


That is also not the case here regarding Cohen. As the Edwards case shows, the Federal Election Commission does not consider payments made to a mistress to be expenditures covered by the federal campaign law, and there is nothing in the public record to suggest that the commission has changed its mind since then. It is therefore unlikely that the prosecutors in this case followed the Justice Department’s own policy with respect to charging decisions in this area.


But “that doesn’t mean they were illegal,” says Smith, regardless of the fact that the Southern District of New York convinced Cohen to plead guilty......snip~


https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/12/...her-did-trump/







[/QUOTE]



Now you know why the WSJ was mocking the SDNY. Like they said, good luck.

[The Xl]

The state prosecutes those who cross them. There are many in politics who have done worse.