The NPR Politics Podcast - Feds Recommend Cohen Be Imprisoned; Special Counsel Says It Can Prove Manafort Lied

Episode Date: December 8, 2018

**CORRECTION: In a previous version of this podcast we said that "the Special Counsel says it can prove Paul Manafort lied about contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign." We should have said that "the Special Counsel says it can prove Paul Manafort lied about his contacts with a Russian and his contacts with the Trump administration after his plea deal."** In a much-anticipated court filing Friday evening, prosecutors argued against leniency for Cohen, saying he had committed four federal crimes over the course of several years. Cohen, they say, was "motivated by personal greed," and they argue that he "repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends." And the government says Paul Manafort allegedly lied to prosecutors about his communications with officials in the Trump administration, "information pertinent to another Department of Justice investigation" and more. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Kate Hall in Austin, Texas, wondering how long I can sit here in my driveway eating a block of leftover brie from a holiday party before I have to go inside and relieve my babysitter. This podcast was recorded at 7.23 p.m. on the 7th of December. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Happy holidays and enjoy the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Prosecutors say President Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, should serve time in prison. And the special counsel says it can prove Paul Manafort lied. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Ryan Lucas. I also cover the Justice Department. And we have the Justice League here because there are so many stories all happening today. We got this massive document dump this evening. And Kerry and Ryan, you've been going through these various documents. What are the key things that you've found? I'll start us off with Cohen. In a filing from the special counsel's office, they provide more details on the information that Cohen has provided them in their investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. We learned that outreach from the Russian side dates back as far as 2015. We also learned that he was providing other information, including outreach with his own outreach with the White House during the Trump

administration and a couple of other nuggets. But those are a couple of the top line things. All right. And Carrie, what about Manafort? Well, it reminds me of a song that was popular when I was in college by Henry Rollins called Liar. And the government asserts that Paul Manafort lied and lied and lied and lied again. He's a lying liar who lied, apparently. And they assert that they can prove this because they found text messages that suggest he was in contact with administration officials as late as February 2018. And he authorized somebody else on his behalf to be in touch with a senior administration official as latest, May 2018. Remember, there's been reporting that his lawyers and Trump's lawyers have kind of been in cahoots or have had discussions in the past.

The president himself has said that a pardon is not off the table for Paul Manafort. The question is, what was he talking about with these White House folks right before he decided to plead guilty and cooperate, a deal that apparently has now blown up. OK, so we have these piles of paper. We've gotten the top lines. Let's dig in and let's start with Cohen. So we know from these documents that he has met with the special counsel's office seven times. He's provided what they call relevant information. It has been corroborated.

They've been able to corroborate it with other witnesses, other evidence that they have. That is important. It means they're not all leaning this on Michael Cohen. that really gets to the core of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. And the special counsel says that Cohen obtained this information, that he has now provided to Mueller's team by virtue of his regular contact with company executives during the campaign. That company is the Trump Organization. That's very important because that takes us to the doorstep of not just Trump itself, but also Trump's family. Also, Cohen provided information about contacts that he had with people in the White House,

people in the Trump White House in 2017 and 2018. That, again, takes us to the doorstep of the White House itself. And then we also know that Cohen provided a false statement to Congress and the intelligence committees there about his efforts to get a Trump tower built in Moscow. He lied about this. This is one of the things that he pleaded guilty to. He's told the special counsel about how he prepared that document, how he circulated it to others, potentially for them to weigh in, provide guidance. Who else saw that document before he provided it? That is a question that

I have after reading this document. Hey, Tam, I understand that the White House has actually had a couple of different responses tonight. What are you hearing from there? So first, there's the president. And he tweeted, and it's a short one, actually, totally clears the president. Thank you! Exclamation point. And so I have kind of a complication there, which is that the federal prosecutors in New York who made one of these filings tonight once again referred to the president as Individual One in one of these documents saying that Individual One coordinated with and directed Michael Cohen to make some payments to women like Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal that may have amounted to a violation of campaign finance law. That seems to contrast with what the president is saying on Twitter. One would say that it does. The White House statement from Sarah Sanders is interesting in that regard because she does not say that it totally clears the president. She's basically saying it's old news. And here's what

she says. The government's filings in Mr. Cohen's case tell us nothing of value that wasn't already known. Mr. Cohen has repeatedly lied. And as the prosecution has pointed out to the court, Mr. Cohen is no hero, which that to me is the other big headline of these filings, is that the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have a lot of not nice things to say about Cohen. That's for sure. He's not this, you know, magnanimous hero who came forward out of no self-interest at all to offer all the information he could, but it's a lot more complicated than that. And that he's not even technically cooperating. And that's actually one of the things that Cohen's lawyers did when they made their request for sentencing, is really try to

say that he is cooperating with investigators out of the goodness of his heart because he's a patriot and he wants to move the country forward. And he's turned a page in his personal history. And what prosecutors are saying is, no, no, no, no, no, we're not having any of that. You know what? You were doing this out of personal greed. You were deceptive time and time again. And actually, this whole thing about you cooperating, you're not cooperating quite as much as your lawyers would have us believe you are. That in fact, you don't have a formal cooperation deal because you are unwilling to provide information about all criminal activity that you are aware of and have knowledge of. And that's why prosecutors, in part, are requesting substantial time in prison for him. So these documents don't necessarily look that good for the president.

I mean, does he have something to worry about here? Well, here's the thing. Campaign finance law violations are very hard to prove. You would have to prove that he had some kind of knowing and willful intent. And I have not seen that in any of the documents or any of the testimony that's become public. You know, the president is all over the map and he's sophisticated about some things. But when it comes to the law, maybe not as sophisticated. So I don't know that authorities have gone that far or made that case yet. In order to make that kind of case, they'd have to cough up a lot more

information. It doesn't seem like the prosecutors are putting too fine a point yet on individual one's exposure. Well, in part, because remember, there's Justice Department guidance out there, the Office of Legal Counsel saying you cannot charge a sitting president with a crime while they are the president of the United States. So to the extent that there is something there, we have not yet seen it get all the way to the White House. And even if they did, this would become a matter for Congress and a question of impeachment rather than some kind of criminal proceeding against Donald Trump himself. Political rather than legal. Absolutely. Okay, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, Paul Manafort.

All right. So what did iron ore have to do with the KKK and Martin Luther King's Birmingham campaign? Find out this week on the Code Switch podcast. And we're back. And let's talk about Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman. He pleaded guilty a while back and was supposed to be cooperating with the special counsel's office. It turns out he really isn't cooperating so well. Yeah, not so much.

Not so well. Yeah, not so much. Not so much. Remember that Paul Manafort pleaded guilty a day before a jury was supposed to be selected in Washington, D.C. for a second trial. He already has been convicted this year by another jury in Virginia. He pleaded guilty and acknowledged a whole bunch of criminal conduct largely related to his business and his lobbying business for the pro-Russia government in Ukraine and concealing a whole bunch of things as his finances took a tumble. Remember, he joined the Trump campaign for free in 2016. The question has always been, what was he going to get out of it at the end? But what we have now found, according to the special counsel, is that he entered into a cooperation deal, but really was not cooperating.

They say they met with Paul Manafort 12 times, and this is new. He actually testified before a grand jury twice, but they have caught him, they say, in a number of easily provable lies. They said they have text messages, emails, and other evidence suggesting he was not telling them the truth about a whole bunch of stuff. Some of those things include his contacts with a business associate. Authorities have linked to the Russian intelligence service. Some of them have to do with Paul Manafort's personal money. And then maybe most intriguing, others of these have to do with his contacts with the White House and people in the White House this year, they say that Manafort was in touch himself with senior administration officials or at least one of them in the White House as of February 2018. And then he authorized somebody else on his behalf to be in touch with the White House or a senior official as late as late May 2018.

There's no indication of what those conversations were about. But do we have some sort of inkling as to what they might be? You know, Ryan, they could be anything. But let me just throw this out there. I've been wondering all along if Paul Manafort didn't have some kind of assurance or expectation that he might end up with a presidential pardon. And we know that Paul Manafort's lawyers have been talking to Rudy Giuliani, who's Donald Trump's personal lawyer. And the president himself has said that a pardon is not off the table for Paul Manafort. So I expect if the special counsel team actually does appear at a court hearing and need to go through every single

way in which it says Paul Manafort blew up the plea deal, maybe we'll find out whether a pardon was on the table or not. Curious how they knew about those conversations. Electronic monitoring. Oops. And this document had a lot of stuff blacked out, right? So we don't, I guess, know entirely what was behind all those black bars of redaction. Absolutely. I was refreshing my browser constantly and my computer crashed because so much of this stuff was under seal and I couldn't quite get it.

But, Tam, the most intriguing thing to me that's under seal is one of the things authorities say that Paul Manafort lied about was an ongoing Justice Department investigation. We don't know what that is. And remember, earlier in the week, we found out that former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has also been talking to authorities about some unknown Justice Department investigation. So there are probes out there we don't know very much about right now. I desperately want to know more. If you do know more, give me a call. Yeah, please dial us up. Tell us where those breadcrumbs lead. We will hear at some point in time from Manafort's defense team. We'll get a response from them to these allegations to the filing from the government. And then at some point in time, it sounds as though we'll likely have a court hearing when they go battle this out.

Just want to add that the White House has also weighed in on the Manafort filings. We have a statement from Sarah Sanders on that. She says, the government's filing in Manafort's case says absolutely nothing about the president. It says even less about collusion and is devoted almost entirely to lobbying related issues. Well, I think in a matter where the president's former campaign chairman has reached a plea deal and then apparently blown up the plea deal in part by lying about his contacts with people still in the White House, it's not non-news. There's also this constant refrain that we get from the White House about there's nothing in here about collusion. There's nothing in here about the president. The fact that people who have these close-up ties with the president are dealing with Russians or hiding contacts about Russians, you don't hear the word collusion in there,

but that doesn't mean that this doesn't get to the essence of the special counsel's investigation, which is contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. All right. I think we're going to leave that there for now because there will be many, many updates. But we also had a little bit of personnel news. The president, possibly trying to get out ahead of all of this other stuff, announced a new attorney general, someone who, if he is confirmed, would oversee the Russia investigation. Carrie, can you tell us about him? Yeah, his name is Bill Barr.

He's actually been the attorney general before in the early 1990s. And he has a reputation as a crime fighter, very hard line, very, very hard line on violent crime and drugs. And he also, for the last many years, has either been a corporate legal executive or affiliated with a big law firm in Washington, Kirkland & Ellis. He's also well known for having made a lot of statements about how much power the executive branch has, how much power the president has. And I think he's made a number of statements over the last couple of years that will get senators' attention with respect to Hillary Clinton and this whole Russia investigation too. So there are certainly things that Democrats, when it comes to the confirmation process, are going to have questions about and are going to be able to dig in on. And that might create some uncomfortable moments for him. But pure numbers wise, Republicans have the upper hand in the Senate. They have a majority.

And the Republican response so far to Barr's nomination has been overwhelmingly positive. Let me just say, if history is a guide here, he's going to be asked a lot of questions and be forced to make commitments about what he's going to do with respect to the Russia probe. So Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate from New York, has already said he needs to commit to not interfering or ending the Mueller probe. So Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate from New York, has already said he needs to commit to not interfering or ending the Mueller probe. And he also needs to commit to making any report the special counsel team does public for all to see, not just Congress, but the American people. We'll see. At the same point in time, I will say that Barr does have his supporters who are not Republican members of Congress, who believe that he is an institutionalist.

He believes in the Justice Department and its mission. And he knows the institution from his previous service there. He was also deputy attorney general before he served as attorney general for George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1993. And he's somebody who will carry out the department's mission, they believe, and believes in the rule of law. And you can disagree with other policy views that he has, but they think that that's kind of his bedrock.

And that is probably enough news for now. But also today, FBI director, former FBI director James Comey testified behind closed doors before a couple of congressional committees. So be sure to head to NPR.org to get all the information about that. And we will be back next week. Until then, I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Ryan Lucas.

I also cover the Justice Department. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © BF-WATCH TV 2021