Today, Explained - "Totally clears the President. Thank you!"

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

Except it doesn't. Vox's Andrew Prokop explains why the latest pieces of Robert Mueller's puzzle are bad news for President Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today explained comes from Quip Electric Toothbrushes. The Quip Electric Toothbrush starts at just $25 and your first set of refills for the brush is free. After that, they're $5 every three months. You can find out more at getquip.com slash explained. G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explained. If Robert Mueller's working on a 2016 election puzzle, a puzzle we occasionally get to catch a glimpse of, we got to see him pop in some important pieces on Friday. One's got Paul Manafort's face on it, and the other has got Michael Cohen's. So both of them have agreed to plea deals with the government.

Andrew Prokop was working late Friday night at Vox. Cohen is approaching sentencing. So what happened with him is that both Mueller's team and prosecutors in New York filed their recommendations for his sentencing and basically assessed whether he had been helpful to their investigations. Manafort had agreed to cooperate with great fanfare as part of a plea deal in September, but Mueller's team has accused him of lying to them in their questioning. And so this was the memo where Mueller explained why he thinks Manafort lied and what he lied about. So what did all these revelations tell us about the president

and the 2016 election? I think you can think of what we learned in maybe three buckets. One is the core question of Russian collusion. Two is whether the president tried to obstruct justice and interfere with investigations. And third is this question of campaign finance violations related to payoffs to women during the 2016 campaign. Well, let's start with this collusion bucket. I've heard a lot about that one. What did these memos tell us about the Mueller investigation and what it's getting out of Cohen and Manafort? I think we learned the most about that in the Cohen memo

because Russia and Trump and the Trump business were all over that Cohen memo. So Cohen agreed to this new plea deal with Mueller's team a couple months after he pleaded guilty to, you know, the hush money payments, which we'll get to later. And this was announced two weeks ago, and Cohen admitted lying to Congress about his efforts to get a deal going to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign. OK. And the public did not know anything about this Trump Tower Moscow project during the campaign itself. In 2017, as Congress started to investigate Russia and Trump's ties and so on, Cohen put a story out there. It basically tried to minimize the importance and the length of these talks and how involved Trump was in it. He said he only talked to Trump about it three times and always very briefly. He said that

the talks were all over in January 2016 before the Iowa caucuses. And he said that though he reached out to a Russian official about it, he never heard back. And it turns out that none of those were true. He admitted last week in a plea deal with Mueller that, in fact, the talks continued through June 2016, at least, that, in fact, he had briefed Trump about it more than three times, and he had briefed members of Trump's family about it. And also that when he reached out to the Russian official, he did get a response back and got a call back from the official's personal assistant, and they talked about this potential project for a while. And this was significant because there have been kind of reports about this Trump Tower Moscow over the past year, but Trump Tower Moscow has never shown up in any Mueller charge until this new plea deal with Cohen. It's a new area of legal exposure for the president and perhaps his family too. And why is this particular deal with Russia,

the tower there, so bad for the president? Well, it's while Trump is running for president, he is engaged in these secret talks for a real estate deal that Mueller's team says in this memo could have made Trump's company hundreds of millions of dollars. And then the constant lying about it afterward. This is another level of Trump-Russia involvement during the campaign in which big money was on the line. How about the second bucket, obstruction of justice? What's going on there? So we learned a little more in both the Cohen and the Manafort filings from Mueller. Basically that Mueller has been looking into their contacts with Trump administration officials.

So he said that Cohen gave him information on those contacts with people close to the White House and that Manafort allegedly lied about those contacts, that he said he had never been in touch with anyone from the administration since Trump became president. So, it's not really stated here what this is about, but I think it relates to basically this big question about has Trump been trying to corruptly interfere with the Russia investigation? When these key people in the Russia investigation are in touch with administration officials and either giving information about those contacts or lying about those contacts, the question is what they're talking about. And in particular, the big question involves pardons and whether Trump has been trying to suggest or promise pardons to witnesses who might have information that hurts him and get them to not talk because they know they can expect a pardon later on. And the third bucket isn't related to the Mueller investigation as much, but it's about the whole Stormy Daniels payoff thing? Yeah. So this is Michael Cohen as Trump's lawyer and fixer during the 2016 campaign arranged six-figure payoffs to both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, both of whom were saying they wanted to go public with stories alleging affair or sexual encounter with Trump some years back.

Yeah. with Trump some years back. Prosecutors said that this violated campaign finance law because Cohen ended up arranging these big payments that were clearly designed, they say, to help Trump in the election. And yet they go far beyond what any person is permitted to donate to a candidate. What did we learn about Donald Trump's involvement with those payments on Friday?

Prosecutors said that Trump had directed Cohen to make those illegal payments. Individual one, they call him. They don't name Trump. You know, Cohen has said this before. He said it in court. But now prosecutors from the Southern District of New York are saying it in plain language.

And really, there's been a lot of new attention on the legal risk for the president himself. Right. Believing Cohen is tricky, I guess, because he lied before to the Mueller investigation. The president likes to call him out for that. Does he have receipts or something? Why is he like the star witness here? So when Cohen first came in to talk to Mueller, he said that he had information on the Russia investigation. This was in August. And it turned out that because he's Michael Cohen, he lied again in those first interview talks. Right. So Mueller admits this in the filing and says, yes, he did lie to us at first, but then he came in six more

times to talk to us. And after that first little hiccup involving new lies, that Cohen's information has been reliable. So it sounds like Manafort isn't holding out for any kind of reduced sentence. He's going straight to jail. But what about Cohen? Is he going to have to go to prison for a while? It's highly likely. Cohen asked in his own sentencing memo for a sentence of time served, which would spare him prison entirely. But the New York prosecutors came down pretty hard on him. They said that he's sort of been posing as a cooperating

witness. And while he has provided information, he did not agree to a full cooperation requirement, which would have required him to give information about any criminal information that he knew about from himself or others. So Cohen's version of events is that if he agreed to become a cooperator, then his sentencing would take a long time and he just wanted to move on with his life. I think the more plausible version of events is that Michael Cohen has been around for a long time and may be aware of a lot of crimes and did not necessarily want to be obligated to tell the government everything he knew about potentially decades worth of shady business activity and so forth. So prosecutors in New York recommended that he serve a few years in prison and that he only get a modest benefit, like, you know, maybe a few months less, a year less or so on than that.

So the judge who's sentencing him is expected to be a pretty tough guy. And so it does seem likely that he'll get a sentence of a few years. Taking a step back for this for a second, it just feels like Mueller has slowly been building up to President Trump. And now he's kind of there. I think that's definitely the picture that emerges from these filings. Trump is all over the Michael Cohen filing, his business, his family, his administration. His administration is mentioned in the Manafort filing too. And obviously regarding the campaign finance violations, he's said to have been personally involved in that. So these three investigations,

Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, and the campaign finance hush money payoffs all seem to be pointing increasingly at the Vox video team, and you do not have a Quip electric toothbrush. What kind of toothbrush do you have? Oh, I have the toothbrush that my dentist gave me for free. From like 1996 or whatever? Like about like four months ago. Have you considered converting to an electric toothbrush?

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So, you know, we like a good deal. Perfect. So, Andrew, all this stuff we've talked about just now with Cohen, with Manafort, with Mueller, it just seems real bad for President Trump. How has he responded to all this? Well, on Friday, after these filings came out, the president tweeted, Totally clears the president. Thank you. Oh, does it?

Yes. Just kidding. No. Okay. So has he said anything since? Trump has kind of stuck to his talking points so far. No collusion. no smoking gun. He actually spelled it smocking gun in a tweet Monday morning.

You know, that it's just a witch hunt, that Cohen is lying, that Cohen is just trying to get his sentence reduced, basically trying to minimize everything that we've learned so far and also just assert that there's nothing else more still to learn. Could any of this new stuff that came out on Friday lead to the president being criminally indicted? So the Justice Department has concluded in the past that they do not think that they can indict a sitting president while he is in office. But there are other possibilities, too.

Trump could potentially be on the hook for charges after he leaves office. Then there's potential liability for his company as well, the Trump Organization. They're involved in the Trump Tower Moscow deal. They're involved in hush money payments because Cohen was an employee. And so, yeah, it looks pretty bad. And there was a report from The New York Times this weekend that prosecutors in New York investigating the campaign finance violations are increasingly scrutinizing the Trump organization. And then, of course, there's the question of potential impeachment as well.

Sure. You know, we have a new Democratic House of Representatives coming in. They've generally tried to throw cold water on the prospect of impeaching Trump. Like this is something that the base wants, but the political bigwigs in the Democratic Party think that they would be sure to lose in the Senate where it takes a two-thirds vote, meaning lots of Republicans, to actually remove Trump from office.

But that can change depending on what these investigations find next. So though Mueller and even the investigation in New York regarding the payments the president made to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, even though all that stuff is now even more directly implicating the president in crimes without Republican senators on board with an impeachment plan. It's basically a non-starter. Yeah, it doesn't look like anything can really happen in the near future if the Justice Department sticks with its finding that you can't indict a sitting president. But then after that, the ball would probably be in Congress's court or even in the voters' court as they decide whether to reelect Trump in 2020 because, you know, if he's still president for a second term, then he still wouldn't be able to be indicted.

But to be clear here, there is a difference between indicting him on these criminal charges and impeaching him for what might be criminal activity, right? Yeah. Impeachment is mainly a political process. So it's all about has the president done scandalous and serious things that merit his removal from office? Back in the 1970s, Gerald Ford said that an impeachable offense is whatever the House of Representatives defines it to be at a given moment in history. Basically meaning that, yes, the Constitution says high crimes and misdemeanors, but it does not define that in any way. And it's entirely up to Congress to decide. There have been people who have been saying since Trump got in that he's already done

serious enough things to merit his impeachment. But in the world of political reality, it just has not cleared the bar of a smoking or smocking gun, as we might say, if there is anything that could convince those Republican senators and make removal from office a real possibility. So what's next? Well, everyone is kind of waiting on Mueller as usual. There was a report in Yahoo News by Michael Iscoff recently that basically fed growing rumors that Mueller is nearing the end, that he's about to one way or

another wrap things up in the coming weeks or months. Now, in these filings about Manafort and Cohen and also Michael Flynn that we've gotten recently, there have been a lot of redactions. There's a lot of black bars covering up information and details. And it seems that that relates to other people who haven't been charged yet or ongoing investigations. So there's still a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about. And perhaps Mueller is close to wrapping things up or announcing some big indictments, maybe. Or perhaps he's still involved in, you know, all sorts of lines of investigation that we don't even know about and we have no idea how long they take or how long this will go. Is Mueller taking, like, holidays? Is he a Christmas guy?

I think he's probably the traditional sort. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and so on. I hope there are no big news developments in the Mueller investigation over the holidays. And I hope he gives his hardworking staff some time off and the hardworking journalists who cover him some time off. But we shall see. Andrew Prokop covers the Mueller investigation for Vox. I'm Sean Ramestrom. This is Today Explained. Thanks to Quip Electric Toothbrushes for supporting the show today. The Quip Electric Toothbrush is small.

It fits in your hand. It fits in that bag you're packing for your holiday travel. It might fit into a stocking if you're kind of like a stocking on the fireplace kind of person. Find out more about where the Quip will fit at getquip.com slash explained.