The Sean Hannity of the Left strikes again.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claimed this week that the plea agreement filed last week in the Southern District of New York by President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, contains shocking language. The documents, she explained, suggest Cohen may be tied up in racketeering.
“There’s literally a line in the Michael Cohen plea agreement from last week, where federal prosecutors spell out that Michael Cohen pleading guilty in federal court last week means that federal prosecutors agree to not further prosecute him for the crimes he admitted to in court last week,” she said in a segment that I’m guessing was neither scripted nor displayed on teleprompters.
She added, “But prosecutors explicitly spell out in the plea agreement with him that they are reserving the right to cite those same felonies as predicate crimes in case they ever want to bring a [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] case in the future on this matter.”
“RICO,” she concluded, “that’s racketeering, that’s RICO. As in: Organized crime. Federal prosecutors are reserving the right to charge something here as an organized criminal entity under the RICO statutes and that relates to Michael Cohen. What?”
Federal prosecutors are reserving the right to charge something here as an organized criminal entity under the RICO statutes. And that relates to Michael Cohen. pic.twitter.com/MMJj7ec3Mh
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) August 28, 2018
Maddow would do well to familiarize herself with the term “boilerplate.” Because that’s what the language in the Cohen plea agreement is. It’s standard for the Southern District of New York, according to attorney Ken White.
“Federal plea agreements have lots of stock language that’s been in there forever,” he explained this week in response to the Maddow show segment. “Often nobody remembers why. It might have nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Fortunately, there are many SDNY practitioners who could answer this. So you asked one, right?”
“I mean, [Maddow] if you just seized on some stock language from an agreement you didn’t understand, without asking anyone who did understand, and used it to go on national TV to promote a fatuous ‘HEY LOOK RICO’ narrative – well, that’s some dipshittery of the deepest dye,” he added.
“It is stock language,” he included, “So your proposed inference is bullshit.”
It’s true the Cohen plea agreement includes language pertaining to RICO. It’s also true that this exact language appears in this plea deal, this plea deal, this plea deal, etc. Even the Anthony Weiner May 4, 2017, plea agreement includes language pertaining to 18 U.S.C. §§1961-1968.
Interestingly enough, Maddow, who tried to debunk accurate reports that Weiner tweeted indecent pictures of himself in the summer of 2011, made no mention of the RICO language included in the former New York congressman’s plea agreement when it became available.
If you’re going to cite legal documents to infer a person has ties to organized crime, you should familiarize yourself first with said legal documents. We’re looking at you, Maddow.
