RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-justice-is-partial-1535063261

U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami took a few moments in his Tuesday statement about Michael Cohen’s plea deal to sing neutrality’s praise: “His day of reckoning serves as a reminder that we are a nation of laws, with one set of rules that applies equally to everyone.”

Noble words, and they used to mean something. But a disparity of justice is at the heart of our current crisis of faith in institutions. Americans aren’t outraged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation felt obliged to investigate allegations leveled at campaigns, or that a special counsel is looking at Russian electoral interference. They are instead furious that Lady Justice seems to have it in for only one side.

The country has watched the FBI treat one presidential campaign with kid gloves, the other with informants, warrants and eavesdropping. They’ve seen the Justice Department resist all efforts at accountability, even as it fails to hold its own accountable. And don’t get them started on the one-sided media.

And they are now witnessing unequal treatment in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Yes, the former FBI director deserves credit for smoking out the Russian trolls who interfered in 2016. And one can argue he is obliged to pursue any evidence of criminal acts, even those unrelated to Russia. But what cannot be justified is the one-sided nature of his probe.

Consider Mr. Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who this week pleaded guilty to eight felony charges. Six related to his personal business dealings; the other two involved campaign-finance violations arising from payments to women claiming affairs with Donald Trump. The criminal prosecution of campaign-finance offenses is exceptionally rare (most charges are civil), but let’s take Mr. Khuzami’s word for it when he says Mr. Cohen’s crimes are “particularly significant” because he’s a lawyer who should know better, and also because the payments were for the purpose of “influencing an election” and undermining its “integrity.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/campaign-finance-law-clinton-campaign-committed-worse-violations/

Mueller should investigate more than just the 2016 Trump campaign

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s proxy prosecutor in New York City has obtained a plea agreement with Michael Cohen on some pretty slimy personal-business issues, and in the process, obtained pleas to two federal campaign-finance-law violations . . . that, from my experience as an attorney in the field, do not appear to violate federal campaign-finance law. That aside, maybe this means that Mueller might step out of his snipe hunt of an investigation of Russian “collusion” in 2016 to take an actual interest in whether there was compliance with federal campaign-finance law by both 2016 presidential campaigns, not just President Trump’s. If Mueller is actually concerned, as his designated prosecutor in the Cohen case apparently is, about compliance with the federal statutes setting limits on contributions and reporting of expenditures by campaigns, parties, and candidates, his interest is long overdue. There are several serious enforcement and prosecutorial undertakings awaiting his attention — none involving President Trump or his campaign.

Let’s start with the payments from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to Fusion GPS for the infamous dossier that triggered the entire Mueller investigation of “Russian collusion.” It is still not known how much the Democrats paid to Fusion GPS because that information has not been released, even though it was revealed almost a year ago that the source of payment was the Democrats. We should know the exact amount paid to Fusion GPS by the DNC and the Clinton campaign because all expenditures over $200 by parties and campaigns are required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). However, the Democrats’ payments for the discredited dossier were falsely reported as “legal fees” paid to Perkins Coie, and not disclosed as to the actual vendor, amount, or purpose — as required by federal law. It is a federal offense to falsify an FEC report, which was obviously done in this case. Perhaps there is a conflict of interest for Mueller to investigate this matter, since it involves several of his own agents as potential witnesses, thus suggesting that the investigation of the Fusion GPS payments from Perkins Coie should be referred to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in the same manner that Mueller transferred the Cohen case to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/china-persecution-of-uyghur-minority-demands-international-response/

It is the secrecy that makes whatever is happening in Xinjiang so sinister. The silence of the Xi Jinping regime is broken only by euphemism, which raises suspicions that something epochal, horrible is going on. The population of 12 million Uyghurs seems cowed. The province is under martial rule. Anyone attracting attention is liable to wind up in — where, exactly? A concentration camp? A penal colony? Or, as the People’s Republic of China would have it, a “vocational training center”?

American officials estimate that 1 million Uyghurs have been incarcerated in these facilities, located in a province in northwest China named the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The XUAR, or alternatively, East Turkestan, is the historic home of a group of non-Chinese, ethnically Turkic Muslims called Uyghurs. Since the Qing dynasty reasserted control of the region in the 19th century, relations between the Uyghurs and the Chinese have been tumultuous. But the mass detention and “reeducation” of them, part of China’s ongoing effort to Sinicize the province, is a step down a dark and dangerous path.

The history of the Uyghurs in China is that of a restive minority generating fears among the Chinese majority that the fringe of their empire is pulling away, and the Chinese responding with brutal consolidation. Uyghurs tried to declare independence from the Republic of China multiple times before the Communists came to power; under Mao, there was no shortage of Red Guard violence bent on stamping out their religious practice. More recently the PRC encouraged Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang, hoping to dilute the Uyghur presence in the region. And it has exploited international fears of Islamic terrorism as a pretext to build an immense surveillance state that involves DNA collection, cell-phone monitoring, and the installment of facial-recognition software.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/new-york-state-probes-michael-cohen-trump-organization-payments/

Did the president’s company violate the law in representing pay-off reimbursements to Cohen as legal fees?

Earlier today, we posted my column about yesterday’s revelation that federal prosecutors in Manhattan granted immunity to two American Media Inc. executives, including CEO David Pecker, a longtime friend and collaborator of President Trump’s. As I detail in the column, while news of the immunity grants just broke yesterday, the grants almost certainly happened many weeks ago — likely just after the April search warrants executed at Michael Cohen’s office and residences. The point, it appears, was to shore up the case against Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer. The immunity grants are not a new development signaling sudden momentum in an investigation of President Trump. Of course, if there is such an investigation, they would be relevant.

In the column’s penultimate paragraph, I note that in the eight-count criminal information to which Cohen pled guilty on Tuesday, prosecutors suggested that fraud may have been committed by Cohen and the Trump Organization (President Trump’s real-estate conglomerate). At issue is the manner in which Cohen was reimbursed for the $130,000 hush-money payment to Stephanie Clifford (the porn star better known as Stormy Daniels). Specifically, there are peculiarities in the way Cohen’s reimbursement was totaled up, invoiced, and processed for payment.

Right about the time I submitted the column to my tireless editors late last night, the New York Times broke the news that the Manhattan district attorney’s office is considering criminal charges against the Trump Organization over these payments.

The Times’ William K. Rashbaum reports that this state probe is in its infancy. This, no doubt, is because it was triggered by the aforementioned criminal information the feds filed against Cohen — to be precise, the part of the Cohen case outlined in the last four paragraphs of the “Campaign Finance Violations” section of the press release issued by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).

So . . . what’s this all about?

First, the president has indicated that he personally reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 Stormy Daniels pay-off. As noted in my aforementioned column, this is important because, under campaign-finance law, there is no dollar limit on what a candidate may spend on his own campaign (while other donors have a $2,700 ceiling, which is why Cohen was charged). One question that federal prosecutors have certainly looked into is whether the president himself paid Cohen, as opposed to reimbursing him through a Trump business entity.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/23/how-long-before-cohens-lawyer-changes-his-story-again/

Can Michael Cohen give evidence that President Trump knowingly colluded with Russia, or does he have no knowledge whatsoever? It seems to depend on what story his lawyer is teasing at the moment.

Following Cohen’s guilty plea Tuesday, attorney Lanny Davis said on MSNBC that his client is willing to speak with special counsel Robert Mueller about a “conspiracy to collude,” citing his “knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest.”

That seemed to confirm July 27 CNN and CBS reports that Cohen was prepared to testify that Trump knew in advance about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Russians were expected to offer political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Davis personally confirmed those stories off the record to The Post at the time.

Except now Davis says it isn’t true.

Trump insists he first learned of the meeting from reporters in July 2017. And Axios on Thursday reported that Cohen, in sworn testimony to two congressional committees last year, said he had no idea whether Trump had advance knowledge of the meeting.

That was publicly confirmed by the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), who said Cohen had testified “he was not aware of the meeting prior to its disclosure to the press.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/immunity-agreements-for-american-media-executives-shore-up-cohen-case/

There is almost certainly much less here than meets the eye.

There is always a lag between when things happen and when we learn about them through media reports. That is important to bear in mind when there are breathless news accounts of the kind that broke on Thursday: the revelation that federal prosecutors in New York granted immunity from prosecution to David J. Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media Inc. (AMI) and longtime friend of Donald Trump.

American Media controls the National Enquirer, which was deeply involved in the hush-money payments to two women who allege that they had extramarital liaisons with Donald Trump a dozen years ago and whose silence was purchased when they sought to sell their stories prior to the 2016 election. Naturally, coming on the heels of Tuesday’s guilty plea by Michael Cohen to campaign-finance offenses arising out of those two transactions, there was frenzied speculation that the investigation is heating up, with the noose tightening around the president

In reality, there is almost certainly much less here than meets the eye. In short, while we are just now learning that Pecker and his subordinate, Dylan Howard, were granted immunity, this appears to have happened many weeks ago — to be precise, shortly after search warrants were executed in April on the office and residences of Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer. Back then, prosecutors did not know whether Cohen would fight them or plead guilty. They needed Pecker and Howard in order to tighten up the case against Cohen, not necessarily to make a case on the president.

Perusing the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Vanity Fair reports (here, here, and here), we find something important is missing: They don’t tell us when Pecker and Howard got immunity. But we get a hint. The Times tells us: “In spring 2018, prosecutors subpoenaed communications between Mr. Pecker and Mr. Howard.” We also know that information from Pecker and Howard is reflected in the eight-count criminal information filed against Cohen, which refers to them, respectively, as “Chairman-1” and “Executive-1.” (AMI is “Corporation-1” and the Enquirer is “Magazine-1.”)