https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-cohen-hush-money-president-had-lack-of-criminal-intent/
The prosecutor must establish that Trump understood that his conduct was illegal. The government is unlikely to meet such a demanding burden of proof.
You can be forgiven if you’ve forgotten there even is a Mueller investigation.
Just a week ago, the country was on tenterhooks as the jury in Paul Manafort’s trial headed into the weekend without having reached a verdict. Would they hang? Had Special Counsel Robert Mueller overreached? Did federal judge T. S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia undermine the prosecutors?
Such is the permanent frenzy of the Trump news cycle that, even with Tuesday’s convictions, Manafort and Mueller seem like old news. They’ve been superseded by Michael Cohen’s guilty plea; specifically, by the fallout of Cohen’s having implicated the president in felony campaign-finance offenses during his allocution in Manhattan federal court late Tuesday afternoon — an otherworldly media moment, simultaneous with the jury verdict in Manafort’s trial 200 miles south.
“Implicate” is a loaded word.