Michael Avenatti made a good point last night - Cohen is no longer trump’s ‘attorney’ (Cohen cannot waive conflict of interest.)
Will Cohen take that bullet for trump? Googling penalties for money laundering, bank, tax and wire fraud we find:
Money laundering: If you are convicted for being involved in a money laundering scheme, you could be ordered to pay twice the value of the money laundered (up to $500,000) and be sentenced to serve a prison sentence based on any underlying felonies that accompany the money laundering charges (such as enterprise corruption, securities fraud or drug trafficking charges): [18 U.S.C Section 1956].
Tax evasion: A maximum fine of $100,000 to any individual, and $500,000 if the defendant is a corporation, and/or up to five years in federal prison.
Bank fraud: A fine of up to $1,000,000 and/or a prison sentence of up to 30 years
Mail and wire fraud: Both carry a maximum prison sentence of up to 20 years. If the scheme also involved a bank, the potential fine increases to up to $100,000: [18 U.S.C. Section 1343]
I suspect that you are going to only see some charges show up in federal court in the short term with Cohen, because NY law states that double jeopardy applies to state and federal cases for the same crime.
So, for instance, if you are tried for money laundering at the federal level, you cannot be tried at the state level in NY for that same crime, even though it might also violate NY state law.
The result of this is that a bunch of federal crimes will likely remain unresolved while Trump is in office, because trying those cases would allow Trump to pardon the criminals at the state level effectively.
But there are exceptions. The NY statute says you can’t be prosecuted with exactly the same case in both NY state and Federal court - but if the cases are based on different types of laws, both cases might be able to proceed. E.g. take a (real life) case of a programmer who stole code from his employers. The Feds prosecuted under a statute governing ordinary physical theft; that prosecution failed. But NY state was then able to prosecute on the same facts but under an IP statute.
Schneiderman and Mueller aren’t dopes. They can probably figure out a way to divvy up the cases so that both Feds and the State gets a shot at any defendant if need be.
Furthermore, the NY statute doesn’t cover taxes: a prosecution for Federal tax evasion doesn’t preclude prosecution for evading NY state taxes. (It used to, but that was changed in 2011.) Given the Manafort cases hinges heavily on tax evasion, this is crucial.
But still, your overall conclusion is correct - state charges have more bite, since they can’t be pardoned by Trump.
Oh, no doubt. I know they know exactly how to proceed. I was just pointing out that the Feds might already have evidence necessary to prosecute some of these chumps for federal crimes, but are holding back on them for now.
It’s funny how, unlike a normal case of this stature, there is zero urgency to bring charges and indictments and begin discovery in earnest because the subject’s representation is so poor quality, and the subject himself so volatile, that the longer such action is delayed the more they implicate themselves and open up new avenues of prosecution.
This is going to haunt Trump well past 2020, and probably into his grave. People will look at this whole thing in 25 years and ask each other “why the hell would you have run for President knowing you had so many easily discoverable skeletons in your closets?!”
The ultimate problem with the type of constant cronyism that Trump engages in, is that you end up surrounded by imbeciles like Cohen, instead of competent individuals.
There’s no evidence at the moment that the story is true - but what’s unusual is how the National Enquirer went about this.
Two of the former [Enquirer] employees said they believed that [Michael] Cohen was in close contact with [Enquirer] executives while the company’s reporters were looking into Sajudin’s story, as Cohen had been during other investigations related to Trump. … Another source, who believed that [the Enquirer] suppressed the story to help Trump, said of Sajudin [the tipster the Enquirer paid off], “It’s unheard of to give a guy who calls [the Enquirer]’s tip line big bucks for information he is passing on secondhand. We didn’t pay thousands of dollars for non-stories, let alone tens of thousands. It was a highly curious and questionable situation.”
