Not to be too technical here, but Donald Trump is deep doo-doo after what turned out to be the most significant day yet since the special counsel's investigation began.
On Friday, three new critical court filings emerged but the most damning information for Trump didn't come from Robert Mueller's office this time, it came from the Southern District of New York's sentencing recommendation regarding Michael Cohen. As former Obama Department of Justice official Neal Katyal explained Friday on MSNBC, "For the first time, you have federal prosecutors essentially saying that Donald Trump committed a felony.”
Katyal cited several specific pages in the SDNY filing, beginning with page 11, section 4, "Cohen's Illegal Campaign Contributions." The section recounts the hush-money payments Cohen made to two women (presumably Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal) who claimed to have had affairs with Trump in order to "suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election." Crucially, SDNY writes:
"...with respect to both payments, [Cohen] acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1."
At an August court appearance, Cohen had already said Trump told him to make the payments, but now prosecutors are saying it and that means they have the evidence to prove it. In addition, Katyal notes that because prosecutors argue the express intent behind the payments was to influence the outcome of the election, Trump cannot claim (as John Edwards did) that he made the payments for purely personal reasons regarding his marriage, etc. In other words, the payments were made in direct violation of campaign finance laws.
On page 23, federal prosecutors highlighted in broader terms how Cohen's actions served to undermine our democracy.
Cohen’s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for President of the United States struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency. While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks, or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows. He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs with Individual-1. In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election. It is this type of harm that Congress sought to prevent when it imposed limits on individual contributions to candidates.
Katyal concluded, "Southern District federal prosecutors are alleging that Trump committed a felony," adding, that’s something “I have not seen in my lifetime.”
It’s also worth keeping in mind that defrauding the American people in order to win an election is an impeachable offense that the framers contemplated seriously. I wrote about it when we first learned about the Cohen revelation back in August.
What that means is, like it or not, the incoming Democratic House majority is going to be called upon to contemplate what these crimes mean for the presidency of Donald Trump sooner rather than later.