M.A.G.A.
My attorney got arrested
To clarify, the most secure server in 2016 was apparently Hillary’s private email server. The server Mernieth was referring was the Dems server. 
Collins needs to go.
and then fumigated
Does Cohen have any physical proof of any of these claims he is making? Because as much as I believe him, going purely off his testimony may not be believable to a jury or much of America, given what a lying fuck he has already proven himself to be.
His lawyer said he has the (electronic?) record of the wire transfers of the payments to the women and reimbursements from the Trump Org.
Agreed.
I don’t think that the dual convictions of Manafort and Cohen are by themselves enough to bring down the president. It’s more like reference points that can be indexed for later use.
Right now, the economy’s as good as it’s been in a long time and few people want to think about anything with political gravity. Trump has, to some extent, just been damn lucky and had the wind at his back. That won’t last forever.
Presidents don’t get run out of office because of a BJ in the Oval Office or paying off a prostitute. I’ve said it before: they get impeached because the country’s in a bad mood. There will come a time when the country’s in a bad mood. He’ll be very easy to blame.
I’ve seen mention of a tape as well, but the news is flying so fast right now that I’m not completely sure what is true or not.
If he doesn’t, I bet the SDNY does. He was apparently a bit of a pack-rat, had multiple burner phones, hard drives, and mountains of papers, all of which were seized, and only a tiny minority of which were excluded for privilege.
Manafort was not purely done in by Gates. Most of the testimony came from others, pointing at physical documents - financial records, loan applications, wire transfers, etc. If you compare the first indictment against Manafort to the second - which came a few months after Gates flipped - there’s a whole lot more detail provided, and quite likely a lot of that came from Gates. But there was that “few months” between when he flipped and when they issued the superceding indictment, because they didn’t just record his statement on a tape and drive down to court, they asked him to provide documentation or records that they had missed, they talked to the people that he said he had worked with, etc.
While I’m not a lawyer, I think it’s pretty well known that one of the first legal cases you don’t want to be in is a “he said, she said” matter. Someone on the jury is going to be professional enough to recognize that you can’t just accept one person’s word over the other, and end up penalizing someone because they have bad hygiene or whatever.
If someone tells you something, and that person has a conflict of interest, you need to prove what they said using other witnesses, physical evidence, etc. If someone decides to use Cohen’s testimony against Trump, it won’t be unless there’s supplementary evidence that been collected to go with it.
I just saw one of the jurors on Fox. (Come on, you knew one of them would take their 15 minutes). She is a Trump supporter. She said she went into the trial hoping that Manafort was innocent. But she was convinced by the evidence that he wasn’t and wanted to convict on all 18 counts. She said there was only one juror who wasn’t convinced about the 10 counts. She also said that the jury disregarded Gates’ testimony as they didn’t find him a credible witness. They pretty much relied on just the paper trail. The host tried to lead her to some pro-Trump points but the most she said was that she didn’t like the way the trial came about and felt it was political just to get at Trump. That’s probably what they will pull from her interview to repeat to the Fox faithful.
So, she has definite political biases, but followed the evidence. Good news.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that David Pecker, chairman of AMI, is confirming to prosecutors Trump’s knowing involvement in deals, plural, to silence women.
The dam gives way at last.
No. Just a trickle, so far.
I hope.
Meaning I want a flood like we haven’t seen since Johnstown.
nm
Good news about David Pecker
For a second I thought you wrote Jonestown, and my first thought was “A flood? Damn, that’s a lot of Flavor Aid!”
TBH at first I wrote Altoona, then I thought “are you sure it was Altoona?” Then I recalled that the Great Altoona Flood happened on the same day as the Bowling Green Massacre and therefore didn’t get as much attention.
That’s why I think this outcome is a game-changer, not that it alone will bring down the presidency. But it plants a seed in the minds of at least some people. Trump’s not necessarily in any more immediate danger now than he was a few days ago, but if the wheels start coming off the economy, it won’t be just his reelection he needs to be worried about. I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t tried to execute his own version of the Saturday Night Massacre. He has to know the longer this continues, the worse it gets for him and his family. He has to know that despite all of the “warnings” from Repubs, they will support him if he fires Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller. It’ll be chaos for a few weeks, but they’ll form a protective circle around him because they’ve placed their bets on Trumpism and there’s no going back now.
But getting a conviction, as opposed to a plea deal, is a big win for Mueller. A jury of ordinary people, of presumably different (and maybe not that different) backgrounds, looked at evidence and couldn’t unsee what they saw. The rule of law is under attack, the concept of truth and of justice are under attack, but Manafort made a bet that in the end, there would be enough people in a white, wealthy suburban courtroom to ignore the truth. He lost that bet. It only gets worse from here when his next trial moves across the river.
As for the lone juror who held out, my hunch is that this person went into the deliberations with the idea that he didn’t want to convict on any counts but knew he had to convict Manafort on at least some. He might not have been a hardcore Trumpian; it might have been that he didn’t feel comfortable putting a man he had seen in person for 2 weeks away in a prison for the rest of his life.