"It has never been plausible that Trump did not know": a comprehensive guide to the issue of collusion

Thursday night, CNN's shocking report that Michael Cohen claimed that Donald Trump had already come to know of his son's infamous Trump Tower and a Clinton-peddling, connected to the Kremlin. Lawyer has opened a new front in the president's escalating struggle with his former lawyer. It has also allowed electoral experts, jurisconsults and Russian saga enthusiasts to have a new nucleus for their various theories.

If Cohen's allegations were true, would the President have crossed a red line that would result in collusion? Has his presidency been compromised? Or did CNN report what many had already assumed, despite the various protests of the president and Donald Trump Jr. ? "It was never plausible that Trump did not know it", Bob Bauer, who served as General Counsel for the White House under Barack Obama, m & # 39; said. "The idea that a foreign government promising to bring a revolutionary" land "to the campaign would be invited to a meeting, without executing any suggestion from Donald Trump, at least informing and possibly getting his approval explicit, has never been credible for a moment. " Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counter-intelligence officer, went a step further. If Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting, it would be "the first direct link we made between Trump and what the Russians were trying to do. Like, it was not just a bunch of coffee trees doing things under it. "

Trump critics have long doubted Trump's claims of ignorance about the meeting.They point to a series of calls made by Don Jr. to a blocked number before and after meeting with him." Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya And then, there was the speech that Trump gave on June 7, a few days before the Trump Tower meeting, during which he announced that a "big speech" that he would wire would reveal damaging information about his political rival from then on. "I'm going to deliver a major speech on Monday probably next week and we'll discuss all the things that took place with the Clintons, "said Trump." I think you'll find this very informative and very, very interesting. I wonder if the press will want to attend, who knows.

If Trump was aware of the Veselnitskaya meeting in June 2016 – not in July 2017 as the president said – these actions can be seen in an entirely different light. "Trump people have insisted that there is just some kind of chance in all these contacts of the Russia-Trump campaign," Bauer told me. "But in fact, once you have the candidate directly involved effectively in communications with the Russians about the campaign … there is something very concerted about it, and it's just in the middle of extracting the maximum benefits of the Russian offer of electoral assistance. "

Trump's alleged behavior suggests some criminality.legal experts with whom I spoke." I do not I'm not sure it's definitive. It would show Trump's knowledge of the interactions between the campaign and the Russians, "said a DC defense lawyer, who has worked on previous White House ethics cases. added: "There is no specific crime that circumscribes such an activity by itself.No more – as a kind of violation of the electoral law – it is one more fact that indicates that the foreigners contributed to the campaign. "

As I reported at the first meeting of Don Jr. with Veselnitskaya, The promise to compromise the information on Clinton as the pretext of the meeting raised the possibility that the Trump campaign violated the Federal Election Campaign Act.Under the law, it is a crime to solicit or accept a campaign gift from a foreign or national government. And in the political world, where the search for opposition is a commodity of gra In terms of value, dirt on Clinton could be a contribution "in kind". Of course, the White House denied that the Russians had actually kept their promise, arguing that the meeting was therefore irrelevant. According to William Jeffress, a DC attorney who worked on the vanquishing case of Valerie Plame this argument could hold water. "Cohen's story undermines the" no collusion "mantra," he said. "But accepting an offer of dirt over Clinton, even from Russia, would not be a crime without knowing that it's not a crime. it was obtained illegally. "

Bauer, however, does not agree." There is a direct violation of the federal campaign funding involved here. The law is very clear that foreign nationals can not spend money to influence and elect. This is an extremely broad prohibition, and Congress has amended it to tighten it several times, "he replied." If the Russians were engaged in a criminal conspiracy to violate the campaign finance law and spent money to violate this law, so US citizens are responsible for supporting, encouraging, helping to lead and shape that activity. citizens to provide this type of assistance to a foreign national, and the criminal law that imposes the responsibility of complicity. "

But, in reality, the debate depends on the definition of collusion." The Trump legal team rejected the idea that there is such a crime. "For something to be a crime, there must be a law that you claim to be violated, "said former White House lawyer Jay Sekulow Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker. "There is no law that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion. "

But Rangappa suggested that Trump's campaign may still have been conniving, despite that." Collusion does not have to be criminal, "she said." Collusion secretly conspires or works with a foreign power to help him in his secret operation. "Bauer also suggested that collusion could be defined more broadly." Collusion is a shortcut, right? But that certainly covers technical infractions. It includes US citizen assistance and support for a foreign national trying to influence a federal election, which is illegal, "he said.

Beyond the issue of collusion, a number of Trumpworld characters might fall on a indiscriminate accusation – definition, namely, perjury – anyway you cut him off, somebody about the Trump Tower meeting. "He was not aware of it, "Don Jr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, referring to his father's knowledge of the meeting." And, frankly, by the time everyone knew about it, that was 39, was the summer of this year, as I said earlier, I would not have liked to involve him because it had nothing to do with him. "Report is correct, Don Jr. would have perjured himself, and then there is Cohen himself, a source familiar with the testimony of Cohen before the testimony of the House Intelligence Committee told CNN that he had not testified that Trump had knowledge of the meeting, but the report does not state that he denied that the President did it. The stakes of his eventual interview with Mueller have also increased. "If Cohen is telling the truth, there is literally no way Trump can sit with Mueller for an interview," Rangappa said. "Trump can not afford to lie in front of Mueller, and if he lies to Mueller, then he's done … he's definitely on the line of a crime."