michael-cohen

Go Back to Normal After Trump? No Thanks

America produced a corrupt president. We can do better.

.. Elijah Cummings, the Oversight Committee chairman, pined for a return to a pre-Trump America. “We have got to get back to normal,” he said.

But Normal America produced Donald Trump, fueled his cult of personality and created the conditions for him to rise to the height of political power. If anything, Michael Cohen’s testimony was a devastating indictment of decisions that Normal America made over the past few decades that produced President Trump in 2016.

Most of the charges — proven or alleged — against those caught up in the Mueller investigation are not obviously related to treasonous collusion with Moscow. It’s proof, the president’s blinkered backers bray, that the whole inquiry is a waste of time.

Read another way, that set of facts shows how decades of declining prosecutions of white-collar crimes may have allowed Paul Manafort, a man guilty of tax evasion and bank fraud, to lead a presidential campaign. If the number of white-collar crimes prosecuted by the Justice Department had not fallen more than 40 percent in the past 20 years, perhaps Mr. Cohen, who committed tax fraud and bank fraud, might not have ascended to become deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, a post he held until June 2018.

Then there’s the president himself, Exhibit A of what happens when a country spends decades treating crimes by the poor as felonies and crimes by the powerful as misdemeanors.

At the start of Mr. Trump’s career, he and his father were charged with discriminating against African-Americans in their apartment rentals. Father and son settled with the government and admitted no wrongdoing.

Later in life, Mr. Trump’s casino was charged with money laundering and got off with a fine. Just after Mr. Trump was elected, his cardboard castle of a university that bore his name settled a class-action lawsuit brought by from former students.

It took a shoe-leather investigation by The Washington Post to prompt authorities to assess that the Trump Foundation, founded in 1987, was being used as the family A.T.M. The New York State attorney general charged the foundation with “improper and extensive political activity, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions, and failure to follow basic fiduciary obligations or to implement even elementary corporate formalities required by law.” Imagine if the foundation had been scrutinized years before Mr. Trump ran for president.

Democrats, paging through the catalog of legal malfeasance connected to the president, worry that investigating too many of them will make the party vulnerable to claims of overreach. But exuberance in defense of justice is no vice, so as long as they don’t go full #Benghazi. After all, accountability has been in short supply of late.

It may well be a myth that no one was jailed after the 2008 financial crisis — 56 bankers and traders, including 13 C.E.O.s, were sent to prison. But none were prominent. And the boiling rage about the fact that mortgage owners got stuck with the bill for the sins of high finance was an animating factor for Trump voters. The Tea Party got its revenge on the system it saw as corrupt in 2016. Occupy Wall Street is now standing restlessly in the wings and calling for world revolution as it waits for its turn in 2020. Justice delayed, after all, is justice denied.

Democratic societies are the result of choices that voters make. Last year, more than 60 percent of federal criminal prosecutions came in immigration-related cases. That follows: The voters who put Mr. Trump in office wanted a crackdown on noncitizens making lives for themselves illegally in the United States. That’s happening. But it also means that the number of prosecutions for all other types of crimes — committed by citizens making their living illegally in the country — are way down.

When gobs of resources are directed at something like reducing violent crime, the amount of violent crime declines. When the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Division gets stuck with the same number of special agents it had 50 years ago, lots of tax cheating is going to go undetected and unpunished. If Congress decides not to properly fund the I.R.S., it wouldn’t be overreach for Democrats to look into the president’s tax returns. After all, Mr. Trump’s tax scheming over the years included outright fraud, according to a Times investigation.

Recent research suggests that the public is increasingly aware of the seriousness of white-collar crime and becoming more punitive toward those found guilty of it. Sentences for white-collar criminals are getting longer. But while Americans still feel that violent criminals warrant harsher sentences, they say they want equal or more resources devoted to white-collar crime control.

Harder still is deterring white-collar crime, wrongly perceived as victimless, in the first place. “Without the same psychological stop signs that signal that one is about to break the law, many white-collar criminals cannot identify in hindsight the moment they crossed the line,” wrote former federal prosecutor Nicolas Bourtin.

Mr. Cohen now says, after a decade of dutiful service including issuing an estimated 500 threats against those seen as somehow threatening to Mr. Trump, that it was Mr. Trump’s behavior in office that led to an epiphany about the weight of Mr. Cohen’s own guilt. But Mr. Cohen was no doubt hustled along to that realization when he was arrested and staring down the long corridor of a multiyear prison sentence.

Normal America gave white-collar criminals parking tickets, while sending SWAT teams after drug dealers because it viewed one type of criminal as a far greater threat to the republic. Now is not the time to return to what was normal. It’s a time to learn from past misjudgments.

The Sycophant and the Sociopath

Donald Trump specializes in spectacular breakups.

First there was Ivana. Then there was Marla. Now comes trouble in paradise with Kim.

.. This time, it wasn’t just lust, betrayal and secrets splayed across Page Six. This time, it was in Congress, part of an investigation that could lead to legal jeopardy for the Trumps or impeachment for the president.

.. In his testimony, Michael Cohen called himself a “fool” when it came to Trump. “I ignored my conscience and acted loyal to a man when I should not have,” Cohen said. A fool for love, held in thrall by Trump. How could anyone be held in thrall by such a sleazy goofball, much less offer to take a bullet for him or make 500 threats on his behalf?

.. “It seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” said Cohen in his “Goodfellas” accent, adding that being around the “icon” was “intoxicating.”

“Mr. Trump is an enigma,” Cohen said. “He is complicated, as am I.”

Actually, Trump is simple, grasping for money, attention and fame. The enigma about Trump is why he cut off his lap dog so brutally that Cohen fell into the embrace of Robert Mueller and New York federal prosecutors. Trump is often compared to a mob boss, but Michael Corleone would never turn on a loyal capo, only on one who had crossed him.

The portrait Cohen drew of Trump was not surprising. It has been apparent for some time that the president is a con man, racist, cheat and liar. (See: Jared Kushner security clearance.)

What was most compelling about the congressional hearing was the portrait of the sadistic relationship between the sycophant and the sociopath.

Cohen told the House Oversight Committee that working for Trump had made him feel that he was “involved in something greater than yourself — that you were somehow changing the world.”

Threatening to sue people and take away their livelihoods or ruin their reputations isn’t exactly Greenpeace or Doctors Without Borders. But Cohen was chugging Trump Kool-Aid. He saw himself as Trump’s protector, the thug’s thug.

In late 2017, he appeared to get misty while talking to Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox about Trump: “One man who wants to do so much good with so many detractors against him needs support.” He vowed he would never walk away from Trump, no matter what. A year ago, he even shopped around a book that was meant to be a rebuttal to Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” pitched as the “family fix-it guy” and titled “Trump Revolution: From the Tower to the White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump.”

.. He understands Trump now.

A stung Trump went on a tweet storm Friday morning, bringing up that book proposal, calling it a “‘love letter to Trump’ manuscript,” and noting: “Written and submitted long after Charlottesville and Helsinki, his phony reasons for going rogue. Book is exact opposite of his fake testimony, which now is a lie!”

Unlike many Republican TV commentators who can wash away past sins about Sarah Palin and the Iraq war — and get a big payday and liberal love — by trashing Trump, Cohen is not destined for reputation rehab.

The problem in a nutshell, as Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien once told The Times, was that Michael Cohen wasn’t Roy Cohn. The latter Trump lawyer was the one who helped shape Trump’s character or lack thereof, drumming in the win-at-all-costs mentality Donald had learned at his father’s knee.

Trump, who once bleated “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” in his anger about Jeff Sessions recusing himself, wanted a lawyer who was whip-smart, amoral, ruthless and predatory. Cohen was merely Renfield to Trump’s Dracula, gratefully eating insects and doing the fiend’s bidding.

Trump used Cohen for dirty deeds done dirt cheap, as ACDC sang.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump showed up late to Cohen’s son’s bar mitzvah and then made a belittling speech about how he had come only because Cohen had begged him and everyone around him. The Times revealed last April that Trump had regularly threatened to fire Cohen and quoted Roger Stone saying that Trump mocked Cohen for overpaying for Trump real estate.

With a few exceptions in his inner circle and with family, Trump doesn’t give loyalty or deserve it. That’s why Republicans on the Hill who so obsequiously stand by him will eventually learn it wasn’t worth it, just as Cohen warned them.

Loyalty is a rare commodity in Washington. And Cohen is not the most wretched sycophant in political history. That honor goes to Andrew Young, a slavishly devoted aide to John Edwards during the 2008 campaign who served as a driver, personal shopper, handyman and butler to the North Carolina senator.

When Edwards had an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter and a pregnancy ensued, he persuaded Young to say that he was the father. Edwards also got Young to go on the lam with his wife, who was a nurse, and Hunter and the baby, hiding out in fancy hotels and a posh home near Santa Barbara — an odyssey financed by Young and Bunny Mellon. As Young wrote in “The Politician,” inside the campaign there was “a cult-like atmosphere” that encouraged extreme sycophancy.

When Trump gave me a tour of his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower in the summer of 2016, he introduced Cohen as “my lawyer.” Cohen looked furtive, standing around with Trump favorites Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks and a few young guys at a desk and a whole bunch of Trump portraits and cutouts and a wall with pictures of Trump’s vanquished primary rivals.

It was the least presidential campaign headquarters ever, with the drywall still unfinished in some places. As The Times reported, Cohen, who had been pushing for years for Trump to be president, was jealous of the attention Trump gave Lewandowski.

When Trump somehow stumbled into the presidency, he and his family did not think Cohen was up to snuff to come to Washington, much less get some high-level job like chief of staff that he dreamed of. The Journal reported that Cohen and his guests did not even get priority access to the inaugural fetes.

“He was central casting for Trump Tower but not for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me. “The problem is, of course, that much of what burdens Cohen is exactly what Trump liked about him in the past. He was willing to be awful on command and had done so countless times making countless enemies. As someone who was the target of this behavior, I can tell you it was so cartoonish as to be ridiculous.”

Everyone is disposable in Trumpworld. They sidelined the fixer. By the time federal prosecutors were investigating Cohen’s hush payments to Trump inamoratas, an adult-film actress and a former Playboy model, Trump was barely speaking to Cohen.

“Boss, I miss you so much,” he said in a rare phone call with Trump, The Journal reported. “I wish I was down there with you. It’s really hard for me to be here.”

The yearning was even more palpable than texts from Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sanchez.

The self-styled protector was in purdah and he resented it.

“If Trump was more sophisticated and had the ability to think long term, he would have anticipated that Cohen might have become a problem if he didn’t hold him close,” O’Brien told me. But Trump isn’t a long-term thinker.

“He’s never had to deal with the people he has face-planted coming back to haunt him — ever. He’s been doing this to people for decades,” O’Brien said. The difference now? “He never had law enforcement turning people on him and essentially weaponizing them against him.”

D’Antonio agreed that “the president made the mistake of disrespecting Cohen because he believed he had purchased Michael and that he would stay bought. When the underdog turns and bites hard, the overdog is always surprised.”

Morality and Michael Cohen

Wednesday’s testimony and the crisis of American conscience.

I often wonder who didn’t love Donald Trump. I often wonder who left an affection void that he has tried to fill by winning attention, which is not the same thing. He’s turned his life into a marketing strategy. As Michael Cohen said in his testimony on Wednesday, even the presidential campaign was a marketing campaign to build the Trump brand.

In turning himself into a brand he’s turned himself into a human shell, so brittle and gilded that there is no place for people close to him to attach. His desperate attempts to be loved have made him unable to receive love.

Imagine what your own life would be like if you had no love in it, if you were just using people and being used. Trump, personifying the worst elements in our culture, is like a providentially sent gong meant to wake us up and direct us toward a better path.

Nonetheless, his kind of life has an allure for other lonely people who also live under the illusion that you can win love and respect with bling and buzz. Michael Cohen was one of these people. He testified that in serving Donald Trump he felt he was serving a cause larger than self. Those causes were celebrity and wealth.

.. Getting arrested seems to have been a good education for Cohen. He now realizes that Trump will not provide him with the sustenance he needs. I believe that Cohen basically told the truth in his testimony on Wednesday, but I don’t believe that he is a changed man.

There is none of the purgation of self and transformation of spirit that happens among people who have truly been altered. He’s just switched teams and concluded that the Democrats can now give him what he wants, so he says what appeals to them. That may be progress, but it is not moral renewal.

Cohen has left the Thugs for Trump club and passed that baton to certain House Republicans. I would have loved to have been in the strategy session when the House Republicans decided to be incurious about Trump’s sins and crimes but to rip the skin off Cohen.

Normal people have moral sentiments. Normal people are repulsed when the president of their own nation lies, cheats, practices bigotry, allegedly pays off porn star mistresses.

Were Republican House members enthusiastic or morose as they decided to turn off their own moral circuits, when they decided to be monumentally unconcerned by the fact that their leader may be a moral cretin?

Do they think that having anesthetized their moral sense in this case they will simply turn it on again down the road? Having turned off their soul at work, do they think they will be able to turn it on again when they go home to the spouse and kids?

This is how moral corrosion happens. Supporting Trump requires daily acts of moral distancing, a process that means that after a few months you are tolerant of any corruption. You are morally numb to everything. You end up where Representative Jim Jordan blandly ended up Wednesday, in referring to the hush-money scheme: “I think it’s news we knew about.”

I’ve heard the rationalizations. This is gang warfare. We have to do everything we can to defend our team. The other team leaves us no choice. Those are the sorts of things people say to give themselves permission to yield to their venal ambitions. Those are the sorts of things rookies and amateurs say.

Republican focus on discrediting Cohen leaves little time to defend Trump

“I am so proud to take the @CPAC stage tomorrow morning w two of my heroes @RepMarkMeadows and @Jim_Jordan who were courageous in Congress today,” he wrote. “You speak for all of us.”

But former governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.), who is close to the president, said on ABC that he can “guarantee” Trump is “sitting in Vietnam right now, fuming that no one’s defending him.” He also argued the performance was “either a failure of those Republicans on the Hill or a failure of the White House to have a unified strategy with them.”

“There hasn’t been one Republican yet who’s tried to defend the president on the substance,” he said. “As the day goes on, [people are] going to get tired of hearing the attacks on Cohen’s credibility. . . . Where’s the defense of the president?”

Other Republicans on the Hill privately agreed. Most, however, mused that Jordan couldn’t have done any better given his position in the minority and the fact that Republicans were defending Trump.

“Truthfully, it is tough to ignore some of the gross immoral behavior by the president,” said one senior House Republican who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “The reason there was no defense is because there is no defense.”

Jordan, a fierce Trump ally, said his strategy was working during a committee break Wednesday evening. His members had prepared and coordinated and “were in touch with all kinds of people” to get ready, he said — though he played coy when asked about coordination with White House.

GOP leaders were apprised of the strategy to discredit Cohen as untrustworthy. But they gave Jordan, who is known for his bulldog-like tactics grilling witnesses during hearings, free rein.

“We’re asking the questions that we think need to be asked,” Jordan said of his strategy. “We’re making the point that we think the American people need to understand, plain and simply.”

Jordan pointed to Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) line of questioning when pressed for an example of a defense of Trump. Massie had referenced Cohen’s written testimony, in which he said he paid money to a porn star without considering whether it was the right thing to do.

“Is that being a good lawyer? To not even consider whether it’s legal or not?” Massie asked. Cohen didn’t answer the question, merely arguing that he did what he thought Trump wanted.

The hearing marked Jordan’s first turn in the spotlight as the leader of the committee’s Republicans. Trump personally wanted him or his close friend Meadows to lead his defense against the Democrats. And many Republicans in the House, well-versed in Jordan’s tactics, agreed with the promotion.

When Republicans did try to defend Trump, their approach didn’t seem to elicit the intended effect. Meadows tried to parry Cohen’s allegation that Trump was a racist by inviting a longtime black friend of Trump’s, Lynne Patton, to stand behind him.

But the moment attracted criticism, when two black Democrats on the panel scoffed at Meadows’s suggestion that a person with a black friend could not possibly be a racist.

“Would you agree that someone could deny rental units to African Americans, lead the birther movement, refer to the diaspora as ‘shithole countries,’ refer to white supremacists as ‘fine people,’ have a black friend, and still be racist?” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), a freshman legislator, asked Cohen at one point.

The question was clearly for Meadows. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), another freshman, was less forgiving and even seemed to suggest Meadows was racist for bringing in a black woman and using her as “a prop” to defend the president.