Democrats are seething after a last-ditch effort to take down President Donald Trump has failed. Federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan announced Thursday that they have concluded their investigation into alleged Trump campaign finance violations and will not be pressing additional charges, according to the AP.
This is the end
Former Trump lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating campaign finance laws by orchestrating hush-money payments to former adult film star Stormy Daniels — real name Stephanie Clifford — and former Playboy centerfold model Karen McDougal. He began a three-year prison stint in May for arranging the payments, in addition to tax evasion and bank fraud.
After wrapping up the Cohen part of the investigation, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York (SDNY) were focused on whether Trump Organization executives — including the president’s eldest son — were involved in compensating Cohen for paying $130,000 to Daniels’ attorney in exchange for her silence. However, Judge William Pauley, who presided over the case, confirmed the end of the probe on Wednesday and added that he would be unsealing evidence related to the investigation.
“The Government now represents that it has concluded the aspects of its investigation that justified the continued sealing of the portions of the Materials relating to Cohen’s campaign finance violations,” Pauley said. The district judge argued that the “weighty public ramifications” of the evidence contained within the sealed court documents warranted public disclosure.
Document dump
In March, Pauley unsealed search warrants related to Cohen’s arrest but kept much of the evidence from the case under wraps since federal prosecutors were still examining the role of the Trump Organization in the hush-money scheme. The latest document dump includes affidavits showing that Cohen was in contact with Trump, campaign press secretary Hope Hicks, and publishers from the National Enquirer, ostensibly to negotiate the non-disclosure agreement with Daniels’ attorney, Keith Davidson.
“Based on the timing of these calls, and the content of the text messages and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story,” the affidavit states.
The timeline suggests that the Trump campaign reached out to Daniels and McDougal to keep them quiet ahead of the upcoming election, a development that critics of the president would say constitutes a campaign finance violation. However, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told The Hill that the unsealed documents are of no concern to the president now that the case is over.
“We stand by our statement issued yesterday,” Sekulow wrote in an email. “Case closed.”
“We are pleased that the investigation surrounding these ridiculous campaign finance allegations is now closed,” the president’s lawyer said in a statement on Wednesday. “We have maintained from the outset that the President never engaged in any campaign finance violation.”
Mourning the death of an investigation
The ill-fated conclusion to the campaign finance case against Trump comes as a deathblow to his progressive critics who hoped that, following the failure of the Russia investigation, they could find legal justification to impeach the president. Indeed, many on the left thought they had him dead to rights.
“Donald Trump is either going to resign. He’s going to be removed from office by impeachment, or I’m going to beat him in 2020,” Michael Avenatti, who went on to represent Daniels, promised NPR in an August interview. Ironically, Avenatti currently faces criminal charges in New York and California.
Other liberals, such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), continue to deny that Trump is innocent. The congressman argued Thursday that the documents show “there was ample evidence to charge Donald Trump with the same criminal election law violations for which Michael Cohen pled guilty and is now serving time in prison.”
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