The Cohen guilty plea doesn’t get him any closer to collusion.
The Mueller investigation remains a “collusion” probe without any collusion. For all of the media’s heavy breathing about Thursday’s news of a Michael Cohen guilty plea, it doesn’t get Mueller any closer to the stated goal of his investigation. On CNN, where its programming is an endless game of anti-Trump gotcha, Jeff Zucker’s puppets recited his mandated talking point that Trump’s fixer “may” have “broken” everything, blah, blah, blah. But the very conjectural character of this feverish chatter indicated the hollowness of the story. If the plea contained any evidence of collusion, the Hillary donors who make up much of Mueller’s staff would surely have leaked it to CNN by now.
One can only laugh at the sheer propagandistic absurdity of CNN’s “timeline” of “possible” Trump-Russian collusion, which naturally still includes the thoroughly debunked claim that Trump’s aides “weakened” the GOP platform to please Putin. It is one of the media’s favorite fables, which was concocted by the Washington Post, with the help of hawkish dingbats and NeverTrumpers. But as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York has shown repeatedly, the platform’s plank on Russia was strengthened, not weakened.
CNN was also rattling on about Trump’s canceled meeting with Putin, turning a development it would normally treat as a positive into a negative — more evidence that Trump is running scared after the Cohen plea! One of its hysterics thought Trump look “worried” today. He didn’t look worried to me. He confidently treated the news for what it is: a manageable political problem, but hardly material for impeachment.
Does anybody outside of the ruling-class bubble really think that the American people will demand Trump be tossed from office based on a Talmudic reading of his pre-presidential statements? Why, he said that he had no deals in Russia! That his lawyer (whom he wanted to fire at one point) sought a deal but didn’t get one doesn’t contradict his campaign statements. But even if it does, who cares (from the vantage point of impeachment)? Good luck getting two-thirds of the Senate to drive him out of office on that one. Of course, the gibbering pundits on CNN fervently hope that Trump may have lied about this matter more recently. But what’s the basis of that hope? Trump’s lawyers say that in his written responses to Mueller he acknowledged that he knew about Cohen’s talks. “The president said there was a proposal, it was discussed with Cohen, there was a nonbinding letter of intent and it didn’t go beyond that,” said Rudy Giuliani.
So what exactly is incriminating for Trump about Cohen’s plea? It establishes that Cohen lied, not Trump. According to Giuliani, Mueller didn’t even ask Trump in written form about the “timing” of his discussions with Cohen. So any inconsistencies on that score don’t appear to expose Trump to any impeachable material. The only reason Mueller even knew about the talks, says Giuliani, is that Trump’s legal team told him about them. “We have provided them with every document about this from the beginning — that’s the only reason they know about it,” he said.
It is not even clear if the talks about a Trump Tower in Moscow spilled over into the general election. According to Cohen, they ended in June before Trump was even certified as the nominee at a convention the media hyped as a possible impediment to his getting that certification. Trump’s explanation that he couldn’t give up his day job, since he didn’t know for certain if he would win the presidency, gave the cheap shot artists at CNN more material to opine wildly off. See, it was all a stunt! CNN trotted out one of the many scummy, opportunistic Trump biographers (all of whom seem to have cots in the green rooms of MSNBC and CNN) to push the non-sequitur that Trump’s maintenance of his business in early 2016 proved he “never” thought he would win. What juvenile dreck. At this late date, after two years of substantial accomplishments from the Trump administration, liberals are still recycling the lame talking point that Trump wasn’t “serious” about winning the White House. If he is such a clown, why do they spend almost every waking minute fulminating about him? For such an allegedly unserious person, they take him very seriously.
Mueller is the ruling class’s battering ram against Trump, but with each fruitless (impeachment-wise) indictment he reveals that he has got nothing. A determined prosecutor, as the saying goes, can indict a ham sandwich. All Mueller got on Thursday was a lawyer full of baloney, on yet another process crime meaningless to Mueller’s actual mandate.
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