By David Futrelle
Manfort found guilty on eight counts; Cohen pleads guilty on eight counts. That’s 16 big guilties today! And Manafort has another trial on different charges hanging over his head as well. Shit is getting real.
And Trump is having one of his rallies tonight. Wonder if they’ll chant “lock her up?”
Talk amongst yourselves.
@Cat Mara
I so want to make that pie one of these days…
So according to Michael Cohen’s lawyer, he’s intends to refuse a pardon if given.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/22/640795902/michael-cohens-lawyer-says-hed-never-accept-a-pardon-from-president-trump
I’m not sure what to make of it.
*sigh* So Maxime Bernier’s tripling down on the dog-whistle racism.
Eff the Conservative Party of Canada. Eff all these people….
The toddler-in-chief has tweeted about it.
meheeheeheeheehee
Cohen’s refusing pardon? Oh, that’s fun. Someone actually did tell him that he had a chance to be remembered as a hero if he flipped, and wow did he flip hard. I heard a commentator mention that his wife might also be in legal trouble, and that he’d do anything for her. Good for you, Cohen. I mean, fuck you and your criminal ass for sending veiled threats to Stormy Daniels and who knows how many other women, but you’re doing the right thing now, so keep that up and maybe you’ll be able to reclaim some sliver of your soul.
My biggest hope right now is that this intimidates the Republicans into not approving Trump’s supreme court pick. Not much of a hope but I still have it.
CPC is garbo!
But he doesn’t feel dirtied by having willingly worked for the orange one and done his dirty work for years? Hmm.
@K:
Do it. Do eeeeeeetttttt… ?
@WWTH
I sometimes wonder if the whole Qanon is not some elaborate troll by progressives to get Trumpanzees off of Müllers back; because as far as I’m aware the conspiracy theory goes that Müller is secretly working with Trump. So any attempt to undermine the Müller investigation should be seen as illegitimate; a narrative which helps the investigation immensely.
Z &T:
Thanks for the interesting story. One of the things I love about blog communities is the wide variety of experience available to hear about.
My ex mother in law was a bit of a nutcase (in, oh, so many ways). She loved to whine about how hard laundry was. Her husband said they would buy one of those newfangled automatic washers (mind you, this was in the late 70s, so not actually newfangled). She didn’t want one of those because it “wasted water” so they managed to find an brand new old style washer (probably still made for places with electricity but no running water) that just agitated the clothes in water, then you ran each piece through a ringer that squeezed most of the water out and dropped them into the rinse water side. Then you put them back through the ringer, which you had turned so the clothes would fall into a basket. When it wasn’t freezing she would hang them on a line. Otherwise she would use the dryer she got at the same time.
Mind you, you used the same water for everything, so it was whites first, then colors, then dark clothes, then the really dirty things like work clothes, all in the same water. I’m sure this was the height of laundry technology in the 1920s.
What made me think of this was the danger you mentioned. The clothes ringer was two rollers held very close together and spinning slowly but powerfully. You stuck one end of the item in between and it would be drawn through, squeezing out most of the water. There was a “safety bar” just above the ringer that you could hit if your hand, or perhaps your hair got caught in it, that would release the rollers and disengage the whole thing from the motor. If it worked.
All this when machines roughly equivalent to what we use today had been available for decades.
Do I even need to say that she continued to complain about how much work the laundry was?
@dormousing_it
It’s a sign of affection. If your cat is female, she’s treating you like her kitten, bringing you prey to practice killing. Males seem to do it as a form of sharing. Either way, you end up with mice, lizards, and occasional snakes in your house.
I once walked into my room and found a rat on my pillow. It was a native Texas rat, Sigmodon hispidus, the Hispid Cotton Rat. Quite dead, I’m glad to say.
@Otrane
I remember my mom and I having one of those old 1930s style wringer washers in the seventies but it was because we were dirt poor and Mom found it at a yard sale and figured that hooking it up to the kitchen sink and doing the wringing still beat a day at the laundromat.
If you really want your hair to stand on end, laundry-wise, can I recommend “Inside the Victorian Home” by Judith Flanders? It’s an interesting read full stop, but the description of the laundry process made me realize how easy we have it. Even with the old wringer washtub.
@Everyone Else
I’m joining the happy dance, though trying not to be too excited. Like Ohlmann, Pence scares me to death. Not crazy and a true believer. I’m really hoping this leads to action against all of the corruption.
As for Trump, I remember during the campaign, my wasbund gleefully hoping that Trump got the nomination on the grounds that he would be easy to beat. I had a terrible feeling from the beginning. What’s happened since has been beyond belief.
The logic, if it can be called that, of the qanon stuff makes my head hurt.
Otrame:
Or, in the case of one of my family’s cats, a large rubber toy spider. The mighty hunter was so proud that he had brought this home.
On the main topic: I’m not sure whether Trump’s current discomfiture makes the world safer, or more dangerous. He still has access to the launch codes…
@dust bunny
There are plenty of things I’d like to criticize about Cohen. His physical appearance is not one of them.
@ kupo
Eep, you’re right, sorry! It’s an absurd thing I can’t stop seeing and I was so preoccupied with that I didn’t even think what I was saying.
WRT pardons, though I’m pretty sure it’s been mentioned here before…
While this probably doesn’t apply to Cohen anymore, it definitely does to Manafort, although Cohen as a lawyer would be expected to know it:
In the U.S., once you’ve been pardoned for a crime, you lose your ability to claim the Fifth Amendment as protection, because there is no longer any possibility to incriminate yourself. There have been court cases on this exact situation.
And, of course, if you can’t refuse to answer questions, you can still perjure yourself.
I figure Cohen has just decided to cut his losses before any of this mess drags him any deeper. He’s finally realized that Trump has no loyalty to anybody, and is preemptively making sure that he can’t be tossed under the bus like so many of the other people who have worked for Trump.
That’s mostly because the judge, a Reagan appointee, was pretty obviously biased in favor of Manafort. He wouldn’t allow the prosecution to fully explain the complexities of those charges to the jury.
The ten counts were the ones that involved Rick Gates and it may also be an indication that the jury didn’t find Gates’ testimony credible enough to meet the standard for conviction.
Eight counts is certainly more than enough to put Manafort away for the rest of his life. And more than enough leverage for Mueller.
Let’s fact check this, shall we?
1. Both of those violations were, in fact, crimes.
2. The fine for the Obama violation was “big”, not the violation itself. The fine was proportionate to the total donations, which were also quite large. It was the first billion dollar Presidential campaign in history.
3. The Obama campaign violations mainly had to do with sloppy paperwork. There were missing 48 hour notices on a number of small donations that arrived within the 20 day election window, some incorrect dates that turned up during an audit, and the campaign was late returning some donations that exceeded the legal limit. Trump and Cohen’s violations were far more egregious. They aren’t even remotely comparable.
4. This is such a telling tweet. For Trump, settling out of court is the way business normally gets done. Commit a sleazy act, get caught, pay a nominal fine to make the prosecutors go away, rinse and repeat. He’s outraged that Obama, a black man, “got away” with something that Cohen, a white man and a fixer, didn’t.
@Diego Duarte
QAnon strikes me as psyops too, similar to Louise Mensch and TeamPatriot. Maybe not a deliberate, coordinated effort (it seems more like something nihilistic 4channers would do for lulz and attention) but that’s the effect it’s having. It’s like an opiate for MAGAs. Any day now, all the people they hate will be arrested!
It’s been fun watching them try to work yesterday’s news into their grand unified CT. Trump associates convicted? Allll part of the master plan. Mueller’s secretly playing 17,000 dimensional intergalactic mah jongg.
Wonder if MAGA hats come in tinfoil? Serious question.
@dust bunny
No worries, it happens. 🙂
Wow, now here’s damning with faint praise:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cohen-trump-manafort-pardons-1.4794307
@ Marshmallow Stacy Maximal:
are you freakin’ KIDDING me???
The repugnican’ts made their stance on both of those issues clear a long time ago
“law’n’order” is for crushing people who aren’t like us, and “moral s’ponsibility” is for people who aren’t us
*snerk*
@Buttercup
That would make most sense, given that anybody with a sliver of common sense would realize that this narrative sets the far Right back. I mean, yes the charges are supposedly leveled at Democrats, the liberal elite and Hollywood actors, but in practical purposes what this does is legitimize Mueller.
Regardless of what the original intent was, I’m not even going to try to deny the conspiracy, given that it’s working so wonderfully against them.
Tick Tock you rotting tangerine.
@ Buttercup…
I smell a MARKET!!! MAGA hats with tinfoil lining!!!
too pad I sold my heat press with cap attachment 🙁 🙁
get one of those styrofoam “manequin heads” and stretch tinfoil over it print the MAGA logo on the cap then stuff the head into the cap and trim the tinfoil… tuck it into the inner hatband and sell to the gullible paranoid
Wouldn’t you fucking know, he chanted “lock her up”. I think he follows your blog, Dave.
JF
Not just that. I watched an interview with his lawyer. Apparently the penny dropped when Cohen observed the Helsinki fiasco. It was no longer personal, he realised (how long can it possibly take?!) that Trump was unfit for office.
🙂