Even for the commentators whose job it is to follow these things, tracking the progress of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing and wide-ranging investigation into potential election crimes committed by the Trump campaign has been no easy task. Mueller has run a tight ship, reeling out information at his own methodical pace and permitting few leaks; and the investigation has become so broad—to date, 33 individuals or companies have been charged with or pled guilty to crimes—that it’s often been hard to remember its origins and purpose. The investigation’s bewildering complexity is in some ways an advantage to the president, whose message is simple: He did nothing wrong, and the Democrats and the Fake News Media are trying to bring him down out of pure spite.
That’s precisely why the sentencing memorandums filed by prosecutors on Friday are so important: They condense the facts, the ones we know anyway, into a single narrative easy to understand. The two memos in question were filed Friday afternoon by prosecutors for both Mueller and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York (SUDY), and concerned the crimes of President Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Trump exploded on Twitter when law enforcement first began poking around Cohen last May, and now it’s easy to see why: The reports assert that Trump both directed Cohen to buy the silence of women claiming to have had sexual affairs with the candidate and used him as a go-between to conduct business deals in Russia far into his presidential campaign—deals that both Cohen and Trump claimed were scotched long before they were.
The documents are, even for those skeptical of the left’s “collusion” narrative, deeply incriminating.
Consider the hush-money payments Cohen made to porn stars Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal prior to the 2016 presidential election. When these payments were first reported earlier this year, Trump denied that he had known of them at the time. But in their memo, SDNY prosecutors are unequivocal: “Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments. In particular, as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.” Individual 1 is Donald Trump.
Prosecutors further contradict Trump’s later assertion that Cohen was reimbursed via a “monthly retainer” when they allege the Trump Organization attempted fraudulently to disguise the reimbursements: “At the instruction of an executive for the Company, Cohen sent monthly invoices to the Company … falsely indicating that the invoices were being sent pursuant to a ‘retainer agreement.’ The Company then falsely accounted for these payments as ‘legal expenses.’ In fact, no such retainer agreement existed and these payments were not “legal expenses” . . . but were reimbursement payments.’”
Whatever the legal consequences of these fraudulent payments, their revelation chronicles lie after lie by Trump and his associates. It’s worth pointing out, too, that these accusations originate from SDNY’ acting U.S. attorney Rob Khuzami, not Mueller. The president’s complaints about Mueller are irrelevant here.
The other memo, the one filed by the Special Counsel’s Office, details the repeated lies Cohen told both to Congress and to investigators about a business project in Russia he was working on Trump’s behalf during the 2016 campaign. In the memo, prosecutors assert that these lies were told with the express purpose of heading off the investigation into Russian election meddling: “The defendant admitted he told these lies—which he made publicly and in submissions to Congress—in order to (1) minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1 and (2) give the false impression that the Moscow Project had ended before the Iowa caucus and the first presidential primaries, in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations being conducted by Congress and the SCO.”
Prosecutors also give the lie to Trump’s assertion last week that his business deals were immaterial to the Russia investigation: “The defendant’s false statements obscured the fact that the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government. If the project was completed, the Company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues. The fact that Cohen continued to work on the project and discuss it with Individual 1 well into the campaign was material to the ongoing congressional and SCO investigations, particularly because it occurred at a time of sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.”
Finally, Mueller’s memo reveals several new pieces of testimony from Cohen, most notably a late 2015 phone call with “a Russian national who claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’” Cohen recalled that this Russian “repeatedly proposed a meeting between Individual 1 and the President of Russia,” Mueller’s prosecutors write. The Russian told Cohen that “such a meeting could have a ‘phenomenal’ impact ‘not only in political but in a business dimension as well,’ referring to the Moscow project, because there is ‘no bigger warranty in any project than consent of [the President of Russia].’”
Whether this amounts to “collusion” with the Russian government to win the election remains unclear. It’s not obvious from the filing that this Russian was in a position to facilitate such collusion and many details of the charges remain redacted. But Mueller appears to believe some coordination took place between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. We already knew, in any case, that Russian operatives tried hard to influence the election, and that top campaign officials—Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager—were eager to listen. “If it’s what you say,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in an email after it was suggested the Russians wanted to provide the campaign with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, “I love it.”
It is a commonplace, in the Trump era, to say that the old criteria of decency and honor no longer appear to apply. The president’s mendacity is so aggressive, his malfeasance so common, that his everyday behavior no longer surprises and these days rarely elicits condemnation from other Republicans. But it’s worth remembering that high-ranking public officials have resigned from office for doing far less than what Donald Trump is credibly accused of doing in these legal documents. For all of the Trump-Russia story’s confusion and complication, that much, at least, is simple.
