Democrats are certainly milking the news out of Friday’s court filings in the Michael Cohen case, but they’re rightly cautious about taking it all the way to impeachment. President Trump would do himself well by not dumping fresh fuel on the fire — rather than tweeting up a storm.
The city’s own Rep. Jerry Nadler set the basic Dem tone on Sunday, arguing that one alleged crime could be “an impeachable offense” while openly doubting it would “rise to the gravity” of actual impeachment. As head of the Judiciary Committee, he’ll simply hold lots of hearings on the issue to try to embarrass the prez.
He was talking about the case the Southern District looks to be building. The idea is the Cohen-handled hush money for Stormy Daniels, and the Cohen-overseen National Enquirer move to suppress Karen McDougal’s story, constituted spending to help elect Trump — so the failure to report the outlays is a campaign-finance crime.
But that theory has already failed in court: Sen. John Edwards had a fat-cat donor pay off his baby mama while he ran for president. When the feds pressed charges in 2011, he argued his goal was to keep his wife ignorant, not the voters. Jurors acquitted him on one count in 2012 and deadlocked on the rest — and the Justice Department dropped the case.
As for the shame of it all: Trump’s voters have already shown they don’t care about any past infidelity, while anti-Trumpers have bigger issues.
Meanwhile, the only fresh stuff on Russia is a previously unknown outreach to Cohen from someone in Moscow claiming ties to the government, who Cohen never got back to.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s filing does suggest he’s considering an obstruction-of-justice count on the grounds that Trump allegedly encouraged perjury: Cohen kept chasing a possible Trump project in Moscow through the summer of 2016, but he testified to Congress that it had died months earlier.
But anyone hoping for impeachment on those grounds will need Mueller to provide real evidence, far beyond Cohen’s word.
In all, the “revelations” only yielded mild embarrassment for the president and modest hay for Democrats. Yet Trump couldn’t resist days of tweets: “totally clears the President”’ “Leakin’ Jim Comey . . . was so untruthful”; “a simple private transaction” and so on.
At heart, Trump is furious that the lurid “collusion” allegations of the Steele dossier have all fallen completely flat — yet the investigations churn on, searching for some actual wrongdoing. He’d be far better off sticking to that main point, and letting his lawyers sweat the small stuff.
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