Trump Surrounded

I write thrillers based on my over 25 years experience on Wall Street about shady financiers, crooked lawyers and megalomaniacal CEOs who cheat on their taxes, use offshore shell corporations to hide their assets, and launder money.

Sound familiar based on current events?

  

Andrea Kudacki for the New York Times

Yesterday, Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, did a plea bargain acknowledging guilt for campaign-finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of tax and bank fraud and failure to report a foreign bank account.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When someone is surrounded by slimeballs, it's not guilt by association, just the old adage restated Tuesday by Representative Tom Cole, a former House Republican campaign chairman: "Where there's smoke, and there's a lot of smoke, there may well be fire." And there's so much of it here that Trump is not only surrounded, but engulfed.

When the FBI stormed Cohen’s office and hotel room by surprise in April, Rudy Giuliani, former U.S. Attorney who honed his hardball tactics in bringing down many of the 1980s insider traders—decades before he became Trump's attorney—said something very telling: “Is this surprising? Yes. Is it extraordinary? No. This is the way prosecutors get information…”

Giuliani spoke from experience; he knows how prosecutors like Mueller work. They throw lines in the water where they smell something stinky, then reel them in and see who they catch. Then use those peripheral crooks to turn States’ evidence, or just get early convictions and then squeeze the convicted for cooperation in exchange for short sentences. All as part of going after their ultimate prey.

So for Robert Mueller & Co., here's the score so far. Guilty pleas from Michael Flynn,(Trump’s first national security advisor), Rick Gates (Manafort’s longtime associate), and George Papadopoulos (a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor), 32 indicted individuals, and 187 charges regarding evidence of Russian tampering with our 2016 election.

And yesterday, Cohen and Manafort. More significantly, Cohen, in the process of copping his plea, implicated the president on the record in open court in baldly specific terms. He said he made payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to keep them from talking about affairs they had with Trump “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” and, “I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016.

Does anybody really think this is going away?

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, remarking upon the potential for an impeachment inquiry, allowed that, "this is getting deeper, and it's going to get more and more serious."

So where do we go from here? Or where does Mueller go?

All I can say is if I were writing this story as a novel it wouldn’t turn out well for the president. Stay tuned.