Yee-hah
Their new statement is that they agreed to pay Essential Consultants LLC $100k per month for a year for “insight into changing US healthcare law.” After their first meeting, they realized that Cohen was worthless to give them guidance, but the contract required them to continue to pay him $100k for the calendar year until the contract ran out.
Ok, but why would he be holding funds for someone for whom he was a consultant? Particularly commingling them with other companies’ funds?
Note to self: make grand promises to this Novartis company, convince them to sign an iron-clad guaranteed contract (doesn’t seem too difficult if Cohen could do it), then profit!
We don’t actually believe that, do we? What company (who most assuredly has better lawyers than Cohen) doesn’t have a clause in a contract like that with an out covering the other party not being able to provide the expected services?
Consultants (and bagmen, which is a subset of consulting) do this all the time. Look at the reporting of Manafort’s dealings. He was constantly handling other people’s money in the consulting firm’s accounts. I’m covering a court case right now where one party is boasting about the other having given him money that he could have walked away with if he’d wanted.
Well, there’s the crux of things as they stand right now.
We know:
Michael Cohen is broke, at least as far as any liquidity is concerned. The first story on him this week had him putting up his $9m Manhattan apartment to ease that.
Michael Cohen took in millions for Essential Consultants
The only known payouts from Essential were to Stormy Daniels ($130k) and to the playmate who Elliot Broidy may be acting as beard for for Trump ($1.6m)
So…where’s the rest of that money? Is it still sitting in EC’s accounts? Has it been paid out? If it’s in EC’s accounts, that money is Cohen’s, or should be, since it’s his LLC. Why hasn’t he been using it for liquidity?
Moved to the new slush fund / LLC?
Lord no. At least I don’t.
And I mean…what company is writing out $1.2m contracts for consultancy based on “Maybe this guy is helpful. Maybe not. Let’s wait until our first meeting to find out!”
I mean, come on.
Well, hold on, as I said, just because it’s in his company’s accounts, doesn’t mean its his. Legally, a company owns an account, it doesn’t necessarily own the money in it. It could be pledged. It could literally be someone else’s money that the company is merely a custodian of for a period of time. Or it could be some other arrangement.
But we don’t know any of this because all we have is selective, non-legal, disclosure by one party to a lawsuit against the subject of the disclosure.
This is how a law firm says, “Not it.”
Is it possible to construct a violin so small that it actually becomes a gateway to another universe?
Treasury opening an investigation into whether SARs were leaked to Avenatti.
Which, to be honest, they should do.
What sort of penalties would there be for leaking that info? Any idea?
Honestly no idea. And the severity of the penalty may depend on the leaker. If it’s a bank officer, it could result in a revocation of any needed accreditation and maybe fines. If it’s a treasury person, it might be more severe.
But again, that’s just me guessing.
I can’t tell if the WSJ piece also has this, because of the paywall, but a tad more from KAI:
Korean Aerospace Industries confirmed to The Washington Post that it paid $150,000 to Cohen’s company, but spokesman Oh Sung-keon said that it was not aware of its connection to Trump.
The company said that it paid Cohen’s firm “to inform reorganization of our internal accounting system.”
Because everyone knows that Michael Cohen is the world’s go-to expert in corporate internal accounting best practices, duh.
from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mueller-questioned-payment-to-trump-lawyer-michael-cohen/2018/05/09/6ad3a7d6-538d-11e8-a551-5b648abe29ef_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f958fa62ecd8
and oh, by the way…
The company is in contention for a multibillion joint U.S. contract with Lockheed Martin for jet trainers.
So if Cohen’s Essential Consulting accounts had $4.4 mil in them, and he used $130K to pay Daniels, and another $1.6mil to pay the playmate who had the terminated pregnancy, and all that money came from “fees” paid to his consulting business for his “expertise” on communicating with the Trump Administration, which is all perfectly legal as long as he can show he was actually doing consulting work of some kind (thanks SCOTUS)…
…is there even a criminal act here? I mean, optics-wise it’s terrible. Companies pay Cohen for access to Trump, Cohen uses their money to pay off women Trump has had affairs with, possibly even a terminated pregnancy with (nobody really believes a two-bit RNC Fredo paid someone $1.6 mil to cover up an affair/child, all signs point to that being a Trump payout). But bottom line, if there is no criminally prosecutable offense here, Trump will totally bounce off of it because that’s what he does. Gas will be lit, hands will be waved, whatabouts will be ism’d…etc., and in the end he will walk away. Optics have been proven to not impact Trump in the least. There needs to be a CRIME.
Congress can impeach without a crime, and a crime doesn’t force them to impeach. Nothing matters until it becomes more embarrassing to let him stay than to show him the door.
Yeah, the only crimes that will really matter, are ones which are so terrible that the GOP can’t handwave them away. Since Trump can’t be indicted while in office, the only hope is for Congress to do their job and hold them accountable.
Which means that any kind of campaign finance law violation is moot from a criminality perspective. None of that shit matters. Hell, it doesn’t even normally matter. Violation of campaign finance laws generally results in laughably small fines, if anything at all.
In this case, there’s effectively no chance of the GOP in congress actually holding impeachment proceedings for something like campaign finance laws.
Now, that’s not to say that it has no impact. It can have impact in one of two ways:
However, even with number 2, I am skeptical that the GOP leadership in congress will act against Trump for literally anything. I think that they have become so craven, or in the case of folks like Nunes, almost certainly directly culpable for crimes themselves, that they will just never hold Trump accountable at all.
I honestly believe that the only hope for the country is for the Democrats to take control of at least the House, so that they can actually start holding real congressional hearings, and actually start subpoenaing people.
Now we know how Novartis discovered the mad skillz of Essential Consulting…
There’s a difference between a regulatory violation (which takes the FEC years to muddle through and results in as you say small fines) and felony violations: (From a 2014 case)
Federal prosecutors argued, however, that prison time was warranted. “Junker’s crime is serious,” prosecutors wrote in a February court filing. “He was the leader of a multi-object conspiracy to make illegal campaign contributions, to lie to the Federal Election Commission and to defraud the United States by concealing illegal campaign contributions and lobbying expenses from the IRS.”
Also, it’s not settled law that a president can’t be indicted; it’s never gone to the Supreme Court. Now it’s highly unlikely that would happen, but it’s not entirely impossible.
All that said, the most likely outcome is as you’ve outlined.