{UAH} The Really Bad News for Donald Trump on the Michael Cohen Tape

The Really Bad News for Donald Trump on the Michael Cohen Tape

By John Cassidy

July 25, 2018

In addition to implicating Trump Organization executives, the recording confirms that Cohen is now more than just a nuisance to the President.

Photograph by Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Since Donald Trump's former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen was thrust onto the national stage earlier this year, when federal agents raided his home, his hotel room, and his office, it's been difficult to know what to make of him. Does he know things that could get the President in serious political or legal trouble? Or is he merely a bit player in the mash-up of "Goodfellas" and "House of Cards" that the U.S. currently has for a government?

The newly released audiotape of Cohen talking with Trump in September, 2016, about a potential payoff to the National Enquirer—which had bought a kiss-and-tell story from Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007—doesn't answer this question definitively. But the recording does confirm that Cohen is now more than a nuisance to the President. In addition to providing more evidence that Trump knew about the Enquirer's dealings with McDougal, which his campaign denied just before the election, it implicates other Trump Organization executives in schemes that could possibly have violated campaign-finance laws.

None of this hinges on the issue that Lanny Davis and Rudy Giuliani, the media-loving lawyers employed by Cohen and Trump, respectively, spent much of Monday night and Tuesday morning disputing on various cable channels: whether Trump was captured saying, to Cohen, "pay with cash" or "don't pay with cash."

That distinction is important from a public-relations perspective. If Trump said "pay with cash," it looks like he was trying to hide the proposed payment, which, in Cohen's words, would have secured for Trump "all the stuff" that the Enquirerhad received from McDougal. "The only people who use cash are drug dealers and mobsters," Davis, who served as a media surrogate for Bill Clinton's defense team during the Whitewater investigation, told CNN on Monday night. (It was Davis who gave the recording to CNN.)

From a legal perspective, the more pressing question is whether the proposed payment to McDougal—whether in the form of cash or a check—would have represented a campaign expenditure, and whether the Trump campaign was planning to disclose it. Since the deal with American Media, Inc., the Enquirer'sparent company, appears not to have gone through, this issue may seem to be moot—but it might not be. Cohen's payment of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who also claims to have had an affair with Trump, did go through, and the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which conducted the April raid that resulted in the seizure of this tape and other material belonging to Cohen, is reportedly investigating whether that transaction violated campaign-finance laws. Federal prosecutors would surely be interested in obtaining an insider's account of the Enquirer scheme, even if it wasn't consummated.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

 

That seems to be what Davis and Cohen are betting on, anyway. There has been some speculation that Cohen is angling for a Presidential pardon, but he seems unlikely to get one, given his public breach with Trump. ("What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad!" Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning.) Alternatively, Cohen could conceivably cut a deal with the Southern District, in which he would provide information that could also be shared with other federal prosecutors, including Robert Mueller, the special counsel.

Davis said to NBC News that the content of the Cohen-Trump tape "sounds like a John Edwards case." In 2011, federal prosecutors in North Carolina charged Edwards, a former Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, with numerous felony counts of conspiracy and violating campaign-finance laws, for an alleged scheme in which campaign supporters' money was secretly funnelled to his mistress, Rielle Hunter, to keep her away from the media during the 2004 campaign. (Edwards insisted that he was innocent. At trial, in 2012, he was cleared on one of the charges against him, and the judge declared a mistrial on the others.)

To be sure, there are some significant differences between what Edwards was accused of doing and what we know about the 2016 schemes involving McDougal and Daniels. But the fact that Davis is now drawing a parallel will surely set off alarm bells in the White House.

"That is worse news for @realDonaldTrump than anything on the tape. The suggestion is Cohen will testify to an alleged crime," NBC News's Ken Dilanian wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning.

The other bad news for Trump is that Cohen, in making arrangements to pay off the Enquirer, doesn't appear to have been working alone. "I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David," Cohen tells Trump on the tape, apparently referring to David Pecker, the chairman and chief executive of A.M.I. "And I've spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with . . . funding."

Weisselberg is the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. If what Cohen said is accurate, he appears to have discussed with Weisselberg a way to route the proposed payment to A.M.I. through a shell company set up specifically for the purpose, which is what he did in making the payment to Daniels.

This isn't the first time that Weisselberg's name has come up in connection with payments to women before the election. In May, the Times reported that Weisselberg "has known since last year the details of how Mr. Cohen was being reimbursed, which was mainly through payments of $35,000 per month from the trust that contains the president's personal fortune." But that same story also quoted sources saying that Weisselberg "did not know that Mr. Cohen had paid Ms. Clifford when the retainer agreement was struck and when the payments went through."

In claiming that he discussed the proposed payment to A.M.I. with Weisselberg in September, 2016, Cohen wasn't directly contradicting this version of what the Trump executive knew about the payments to Daniels. But the tape does drag Weisselberg and the Trump Organization further into the murk, which can't be good news for the President. "Weisselberg has detailed information about the Trump Organization's operations, business deals and finances," Bloomberg View's Tim O'Brien, the author of a 2005 book about Trump, noted on Tuesday. "If he winds up in investigators' crosshairs for secreting payoffs, he could potentially provide much more damaging information to prosecutors than Cohen ever could about the president's dealmaking."

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