Rotten Fruit Finally Falls From the Poisonous Tree! And One Hits Trump!

Wow! What an eventful day! Two very important former Trump associates are now felons! Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty of 8 out of 18 felony counts of tax evasion and bank fraud, with the other 10 resulting in a hung jury, meaning that he could potentially be retried for them. And he faces another trial in only a few weeks in Washington DC on more charges, making additional convictions highly likely. Even after that, Trump still called Manafort a good man, which is a pretty damning indication of his criteria (e.g. tax evaders) for good people! Probably even more significant, longtime former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen pled guilty to 8 counts of tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance law violations. And critically, he stated under oath in court that the campaign finance law violations, involving the payoff to Stormy Daniels and proposed payoff to AMI related to the Karen Mcdougal story rights, were done in coordination with and AT THE DIRECTION of Trump, effectively making Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in one or more felonies!! Probably the only reason he remains unindicted is that he is the president, and it is generally assumed (although not established law) that a sitting president cannot be indicted. However, this is really the first public evidence from sworn testimony of what looks like a clearly impeachable offense, the significance of which will depend on what if any corroborating evidence is found, which remains to be seen. Of course we have already heard the secretly recorded tape of Trump and Cohen discussing the McDougall affair payment, which ended up not being made. Presumably POTUS and his surrogates like Giuliani will continue to call Cohen a liar, probably dispute the criminality of the whole payoff schemes and generally deny any wrongdoing by Trump. It will be entertaining to see how Sarah Sanders squirms her way out of questions related to this at the next WH press conference! And all this has nothing to do with Russian collusion! Go figure! Of course, we all know that none of this will make any real difference to Trump as long as Republicans control both houses of Congress!

The timing of all of this is important, since the accepted practice of the Justice Department (flagrantly violated by James Comey in 2016 with regards to Hillary Clinton) is to not bring indictments or produce other politically charged headlines related to investigations within two months before an election. That means that Mueller et al have only about two weeks left to bring out indictments of more Trump campaign or administration officials (even though they are not running for office) before they likely will go even deeper underground until after the election. That may also apply to a subpoena for Trump himself to testify, which certainly should come now, but which may never come if, as seems likely, Trump has become a target rather than just a subject of the Mueller investigation. So the next two weeks will be nailbiters! It is also very difficult to calculate the political impact on the midterm elections of additional indictments before then, in terms of whether they would motivate Democratic or Republican voter turnout more, the latter to protect the president from impeachment. My hunch would be that they would be helpful, at least to peel off a few percent of Republican and independent voters. Of course, a lot can happen in two months!