Raise your hand if you’re interested in hearing more about aging sex workers and ridiculous campaign finance laws.
The Washington Post reported Monday night that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee “plan to make President Trump’s alleged involvement in a 2016 scheme to silence two women who claimed they had affairs with him a major investigative focus this fall.” The paper also said that they’re “preparing to hold hearings and call witnesses involved in hush-money payments to ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels as soon as October.”
The news must have given your sagging post-Labor Day spirit just the boost it needed.
This is what Democrats do nowadays. They put all their faith in the chase of some empty wish, and when it turns up empty, they whine that something went wrong.
After special counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up his exhaustive Russia probe without finding any proof of collusion with Russia, Democrats whined that Mueller’s hands were tied.
After extensive reporting on Trump’s personal tax information by both the New York Times and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow revealed old and innocuous returns, Democrats demanded six additional years of Trump’s private tax returns.
And now, more than a month after prosecutors ended their investigation of a weak campaign finance allegation against the Trump campaign — it resulted only in a laughable guilty plea from Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen for something that wasn’t even illegal — Democrats think holding a bunch of hearings can further fan their impeachment dreams that, to date, have not gone anywhere.
“Democrats,” according to the Washington Post report, “say they believe there is already enough evidence to name Trump as a co-conspirator in the episode that resulted in his former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to two campaign finance charges. … The hush-money inquiry will open a new chapter in the House’s months-long consideration of whether to draft articles of impeachment against the president.”
The story is full of quotes by Democrats and lawyers pondering the great mystery of why Cohen, now serving a three-year prison sentence, was hit with the campaign charge but no one else was. The paper quotes one former Federal Election Commission official glibly wondering, “Why aren’t the people who authorized and paid for this culpable?”
The answer lies in the fact that Cohen wasn’t really pleading guilty to campaign violations in anything but the most literal sense. He had been charged with evading $1.4 million in taxes, defrauding financial institutions that loaned him money, and lying to the FBI and Congress. The two campaign finance violations seem to have been thrown in by prosecutors who knew Cohen had already been buried under such a mountain of serious charges that he’d have to make a plea deal. The lesser charges gave them more flexibility about how much time he’d get.
The Post’s own story from the time refers to that pile of misdeeds only once and they’re dismissed as simply “other crimes.”
Trump and his lawyers have maintained no wrongdoing on their part, admitting that Trump paid the settlements to both Daniels and McDougal, while also denying that there were ever any affairs or that the payments had anything to do with the 2016 election.
A person might cover up an alleged affair for any number of reasons, including to avoid national embarrassment or harm to the reputations or even the feelings of family members. (Former North Carolina Democratic Sen. John Edwards successfully used this defense after he was caught using undisclosed donations to conceal his own affair and out-of-wedlock child from his wife.) According to McDougal, Trump had been hiding their supposed affair as far back as 2006, a decade before the settlement money was paid in 2016. “No paper trails for him,” she told Ronan Farrow last year. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.”
If Trump was hiding the affair then, where’s the proof that he decided to continue hiding it solely or even mainly for the purpose of the 2016 election?
Democrats probably know that. But they have another ghost to chase.
