Manhattan D.A. Considers Criminal Charges Against Trump Organization

Donald Trump's pardon powers are limited to FEDERAL charges and convictions.  He holds no power to pardon those convicted of state law violations. Hence, the reason that some hope that the Commonwealth of Virginia and New York State may seek indictments against Paul Manafort and/or Michael Cohen that could lead to convictions or plea deals which would be outside the reach of Trump's efforts to basically bribe individuals with a promise of a pardon.  Along this line, the Manhattan district attorney is now considering criminal charges against the Trump Organization in the aftermath of Michael Cohen's plea deal with federal prosecutors.   A piece in the New York Times looks at this new development and the implications it could have for Cohen, Trump and Trump Organization officers.  Here are highlights:

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and two senior company officials in connection with Michael D. Cohen’s hush money payment to an adult film actress, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter.

A state investigation would center on how the company accounted for its reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who has said she had an affair with President Trump, the officials said.

State charges against the company or its executives could be significant because Mr. Trump has talked about pardoning some of his current or former aides who have faced federal charges. As president, he has no power to pardon people and corporate entities convicted of state crimes.
 The Trump Organization recorded the reimbursement as a legal expense. But Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime fixer, said on Tuesday that he paid Ms. Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, to buy her silence during the 2016 campaign. Federal prosecutors have said the reimbursement payments were for sham legal invoices in connection with a nonexistent retainer agreement. Mr. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges, did no legal work in connection with the matter, prosecutors said.

“On its face, it certainly would be problematic,” said one of the officials familiar with the district attorney’s office review, noting that listing the reimbursement as a legal expense could be a felony under state law.

As the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., considers opening an investigation, the New York State attorney general’s office has moved to open a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Cohen has violated state tax law, an inquiry that would be unrelated to the federal tax evasion charges that he pleaded guilty to on Tuesday, according to a person with knowledge of the state matter.

The attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, in recent days sought a referral from the state Department of Taxation and Finance, which is needed to conduct such an inquiry and to prosecute any violations of state tax law it might uncover, the person said. Such requests are seldom denied. The state’s double jeopardy laws do not apply to tax crimes.

Manhattan prosecutors are focused on whether business records were falsified, one of the officials said. That could be charged as a low-level felony, or as a misdemeanor. It’s a misdemeanor for a person or company to make a false entry in a business record or cause one to be made, with intent to defraud. It becomes a felony if it is done to commit or conceal another crime.
 Court papers in the federal case against Mr. Cohen said he ultimately received $420,000 from the Trump Organization to reimburse him for his $130,000 payment to Ms. Clifford. That is because the Trump Organization included money to cover his taxes on the $130,000, a bonus for him and reimbursement for other campaign expenses.

The company, according to the court papers, accounted for the payment as legal expenses and Mr. Cohen issued phony monthly invoices for $35,000 “pursuant to retainer agreement.”

If Mr. Vance decides to proceed, it would not be the first time he investigated members of the Trump family. He was faulted for not pursuing charges against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who were under criminal investigation in 2012 over allegations that they misled buyers interested in the Trump SoHo condominium project.  

 Personally, I'd love to see Ivanka spend a few years in orange prison garb.  Ditto for Trump, Jr.

A Putin-Sponsored October Surprise?

The previous post looked at fears that Russian hackers might try to either steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump or at least try to seriously disrupt voting returns - Arizona is one state that they apparently have targeted.  The perhaps more serious concern is that bogus or re-written documents could be released - particularly with the help of pro-Putin Wikileaks - that would seek to damage Hillary Clinton and Democrats.  Russia has a track record of such activities in other countries, but never before in America.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the unsettling possibility that malicious efforts could strike American - and how the increasingly irresponsible media which seems to care only about sensationalism, could play right into Russia and Putin's hands. Here are column highlights:

The Russians have just given us an August glimpse of a potential October surprise.

We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?

Russian “dezinformatsiya” campaigns such as this go back to the Cold War; the Soviet portrayal of AIDS as a CIA plot was a classic case. But this type of cyberwar — email hacking and, now, the altering and release of the stolen documents — is a novel escalation. It’s tempting to wonder how differently the Cold War might have gone had there been cyber-hackers back then. 

But it’s clear that Russia’s disinformation wars are as active as ever. On Sunday, Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Times about Russian attempts to undermine a Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity. This Russian use of “weaponized information” helped cause confusion in Ukraine in 2014, when conspiracy theories spread by the Russians about the downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet helped Russians justify their invasion of Crimea.

So does this point to a Putin-sponsored October surprise?

Putin has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in social media as pro-Trump Americans.

The hyper-competitive American media environment is vulnerable to the sort of technique the Russian hackers used in the Soros case — stealing documents, altering them, then releasing them as the original. If Putin’s hackers were to release such a doctored document smearing Clinton in, say, late October, it’s likely that competition would lead outlets to report on the hacked documents before they had a chance to see whether and how they were altered.

We don’t know what, if anything, Putin’s hackers have planned for this fall. But the doctored Soros documents could be a clue.