President Trump seems to be grasping at straws trying to spin the latest legal news about one of his former associates.
On Tuesday, his former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to 8 criminal counts, namely tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations.
While Trump dumped on his former personal attorney and friend — tweeting the morning after his guilty plea to avoid hiring him — he honed in on the campaign finance violations that implicated him during his time as a presidential candidate. And in true Trump fashion, he roped in former President Barack Obama.
Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018
It’s worth asking: how comparable are the campaign finance violations committed by Cohen to those committed by Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign?
Obama’s 2008 campaign was fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for reporting violations.
Specifically, the Obama campaign failed to file a series of 48-hour notices for nearly 1,300 contributions totaling more than $1.8 million. The FEC mandates that campaigns report, within 48 hours, all large contributions received within the 20-day window of Election Day.
According to Politico’s reporting, experts say that while the fine was big, the Obama campaign was north of a billion dollars and the infractions were relatively minor.
But in Cohen’s case, the circumstances are more severe.
In the last year, Trump was alleged to have had extramarital affairs with two women – Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels – before he ran for president, and Cohen was central to paying them hush money.
In the plea agreement, Cohen said that he kept the information about the alleged affairs Trump – who is referred to as “Individual-1” – had quiet “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.”
[Also read: Michael Cohen ‘admitting to lying’ to House Intelligence Committee, Democrat says]
In the charging document, Cohen made a deal with the chairman and CEO of “Corporation-1” (American Media, Inc.) which owned “Magazine-1” (the National Enquirer) to “help deal with negative stories about Individual-1’s relationships with women, by among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”
The chairman and CEO of American Media, Inc. is David Pecker. On Thursday, it was reported that Pecker, a former Trump ally, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors in New York for cooperating in the Cohen case.
The agreement between Cohen and Pecker allowed Cohen to “arrange for the purchase of two stories so as to suppress them and prevent them from influencing the election.”
Cohen admitted he made an “unlawful corporate contribution” of $150,000, which was given to American Media, Inc., to buy McDougal’s silence. She was paid by American Media, Inc., in August 2016 to keep quiet about her affair with Trump.
While Cohen hasn’t been sentenced as of yet, the two counts he pleaded guilty to carry a maximum term of imprisonment of 5 years and a maximum fine of $250,000.
Bottom line is that the two cases couldn’t be more different. The Obama campaign failed to file proper paperwork in time to the FEC. Cohen intentionally obscured an unlawful contribution from the FEC.
