Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy believes that prosecutors will attempt to indict President Donald Trump on campaign finance charges, judging from the sentencing memo in the Michael Cohen case on Friday.
McCarthy, a conservative legal analyst who worked as a prosecutor in the same Southern District of New York jurisdiction that is currently prosecuting Cohen, argued in a column on Fox News that the prosecutors would not have drawn attention to Cohen’s relatively minor campaign finance violations if they did not intend on charging Trump over payments of hush money to two women before he became president:
The major takeaway from the 40-page sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors Friday for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney, is this: The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws.
It has been obvious for some time that President Trump is the principal subject of the investigation still being conducted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
…
When Cohen pleaded guilty in August, prosecutors induced him to make an extraordinary statement in open court: the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of” the candidate for federal office – Donald Trump.
Prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen. Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all.
McCarthy acknowledges the strong case Trump has in his defense, but says that prosecutors may be focusing on him anyway.
On Friday, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who was also once the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and now serves as one of Trump’s lawyers, dismissed the legal danger to the president.
He pointed to Cohen’s conviction for lying to the FBI, which would make his testimony on other matters unreliable. “You have to believe Cohen. Who believes Cohen?” he reportedly said.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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