F.B.I. Raids Office of Trump’s Longtime Lawyer Michael Cohen

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lmachine said:
It is if he did it to influence the election since he didn’t report the campaign contribution and donated over the maximum, and if he tried to disguise the source of the funds he committed bank fraud.
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You are assuming everything that matters. Why be so conservative with it? Why not imagine that he really gave the money to Daniels to buy weapons for Al Quaeda?

Manafort is convicted of nothing. That’s a fact you don’t seem to want to remember. Like the others who have pleaded guilty, Gates pleaded to a “perjury trap” charge of lying to the investigators.
 
lmachine said:
You don’t seem to understand the difference between money laundering and hiring a contractor.
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Money laundering? It’s never money laundering unless the purpose of the payment was to hide a crime. What’s the crime?
 
Xystus said:
I figured it was likely the dossier payments qualified as bank fraud
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Why would it be bank fraud? Did Cohen lie to the bank about his income? Did he blackmail a banker to make an unbankable loan? Did he present his secretary as his wife in signing the bank documents?
What’s the fraud?

Or is it one of those “technical only” frauds that people commit inadvertently every day? Did Cohen perhaps disclose that he owed VISA $4500 when it was really $4675?

On the other hand, if the DNC and Clinton paid foreigners for information intended to influence a campaign, and particularly if they colluded with law enforcement people to present it to a judge as fact in order to get a warrant to spy on a citizen, then a whole raft of crimes got committed.
 
Ridgerunner said:
You are assuming everything that matters.
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I do not have the evidence and communications that Mueller and the DoJ have that was enough to convince a judge to take the extraordinary step of authorizing the raid, so I have to assume.
Ridgerunner said:
Manafort is convicted of nothing. That’s a fact you don’t seem to want to remember. Like the others who have pleaded guilty, Gates pleaded to a “perjury trap” charge of lying to the investigators.
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You said: “But then, nothing charged so far has been a crime other than “lying” to the FBI in some perjury trap.” I was just pointing out that you were incorrect, other crimes have been charged.
Ridgerunner said:
Money laundering? It’s never money laundering unless the purpose of the payment was to hide a crime. What’s the crime?
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My man Cohen violating campaign finance laws.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Why would it be bank fraud?
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i dont really think Cohen committed bank fraud but if we are calling it that i think it fair to ask why funneling money through a law firm to hid the clinton/dnc payments for the dossier is not also fraud. my whole point in this thread is that i dont think we seeing are equal treatment. If i gave the impression i think Cohen is guilty of bank fraud then i guess i was not a clear as i intended.
 
Xystus said:
i dont really think Cohen committed bank fraud but if we are calling it that i think it fair to ask why funneling money through a law firm to hid the clinton/dnc payments for the dossier is not also fraud. my whole point in this thread is that i dont think we seeing are equal treatment.
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How do you know about those Clinton campaign payments? Hint: the payments were all reported to the FEC by law-abiding individuals. It is not a crime to hire a contractor and report all payments. It is a crime to disguise an illegal campaign contribution by funneling it through a shell company (or companies) to hide it from authorities. The Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign are being treated equally; only one of them committed a crime.
 
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Definition of money laundering

the concealment of the origins of illegally obtained money, typically by means of transfers involving foreign banks or legitimate businesses.

Note, you yourself did not have to obtain the money illegally, you can help someone conceal their money. One way for you to collect payments for illegal activities is that you sell them a property at a huge markup over what you paid for it (and what it is worth). You can than say you received the money legally, even if they were really paying you for other, perhaps not so legal activities.
 
lmachine said:
the payments were all reported to the FEC
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i dont doubt the payments to the law firm were reported. i am skeptical that they reported paying the law firm so that the law firm could then turn around to make payments for a dossier they did not want to be connected to.
 
dvdjs said:
If he lied about the purpose of the loan, then he would be guilty of fraud.
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I’d imagine it has something to do with this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...42549c-3ddf-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html
A federal investigation into what role President Trump’s personal attorney played in facilitating payments to two women who alleged affairs with Trump is also examining the lawyer’s interactions with a bank that gave him loans against his taxi business.

When they raided the office of Trump lawyer Michael D. Cohen on Monday, FBI agents sought his communications with New York-based Sterling National Bank about taxi medallions owned by Cohen, according to a person familiar with the search warrant.

The request indicates that prosecutors may have interest in specific financial transactions that Cohen undertook while using his taxi business as collateral.

[…]

Cohen has held taxi interests as a side business even as he worked as a top lawyer for Trump for the past decade. Public records show he took out a business loan from Sterling in late 2014 for an unspecified amount using three taxi companies as collateral. Cohen also obtained a $1.98 million real estate loan with his in-laws from the bank in 2015, records show.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...d6345a-3e89-11e8-912d-16c9e9b37800_story.html
President Trump’s personal attorney Michael D. Cohen sometimes taped conversations with associates, according to three people familiar with his practice, and allies of the president are worried that the recordings were seized by federal investigators in a raid of Cohen’s office and residences this week.

Cohen, who served for a decade as a lawyer at the Trump Organization and is a close confidant of Trump, was known to store the conversations using digital files and then replay them for colleagues, according to people who have interacted with him.

“We heard he had some proclivity to make tapes,” said one Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. “Now we are wondering, who did he tape? Did he store those someplace where they were actually seized? . . . Did they find his recordings?”

[…]

It is unknown whether Cohen taped conversations between himself and Trump. But two people familiar with Cohen’s practices said he recorded both business and political conversations. One associate said Trump knew of Cohen’s practice because the attorney would often play him recordings Cohen had made of his conversations with other top Trump advisers.

“It was his standard practice to do it,” this person said.

Legal experts said Cohen’s taped conversations would be viewed by prosecutors as highly valuable.

“If you are looking for evidence, you can’t do any better than people talking on tape,” said Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor.

Such recordings “would be considered a gold mine,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics.

“The significance is 9.5 to 10 on a 10-point scale,” he added, noting that investigators know “that when people speak on the phone, they are not guarded. They don’t imagine that the conversation will surface.”

[…]

Cohen wanted his business calls on tape so he could use them later as leverage, one person said. He frequently noted that under New York law, only one party had to consent to the taping of a conversation, this person added.

During the 2016 race, Cohen — who did not have a formal role on the campaign — had a reputation among campaign staff as someone to avoid, in part because he was believed to be secretly taping conversations.
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lol
 
The Washington Post slobbers all over itself printing articles like this as do the people who read them. Lol
 
7_Sorrows said:
I pray for all posters who identify as Catholic and who cheer on those trying to destroy our president who was duly elected.
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Don’t worry, The POTUS is doing finely destroying himself. No cheering needed.
 
if you really believe that then you are ignorant of the meaning of both hyperbole and metaphorical. I dont think you are really ignorant of that though. I think that your disdain for Trump leads you to want to call him negative things and you took the opportunity to call him a liar because his use of hyperbolic language. In doing so you inadvertantly called Jesus’ words a lie and when confronted with this you came up with the excuse that it is not hypebole but a metaphore, which is simply wrong, there is no metaphore in those two examples. It is sad that your utter contempt for the president leads you into such predicaments.
 
President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, asked a federal judge in Manhattan on Friday to block the Justice Department from reading documents related to his decade-long legal representation of Mr. Trump and that were taken in a recent F.B.I. raid.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen still were trying to determine what exactly was seized in the raids, which were even broader than have been previously reported. In addition to searching Mr. Cohen’s office and hotel room, prosecutors also obtained warrants to seize material from his cellphones, tablet, laptop and a safe deposit box, according to people briefed on the warrants.

The uncertainty around what was taken has heightened the unease around Mr. Trump, whose lawyers had projected confidence in their dealings with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, but were caught flat-footed by the extraordinary raids on Mr. Cohen. The lawyers fear that Mr. Cohen will not be forthcoming about what was in his files, leaving them girding for the unknown.

A hurriedly scheduled court appearance in Manhattan reflected that worry. The documents could shed light on the president’s relationship with an adviser who has helped steer him through some of his thorniest personal and business dilemmas. Joanna C. Hendon, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, asked a federal judge to temporarily prohibit the Justice Department from reviewing those materials until the matter can be litigated.
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Pretty standard stuff, Cohen will argue stuff is privileged and the USAO-SDNY will argue that anything privileged was already filtered out by the privilege team. Though there’s new info there that the warrant included electronic searches and a safe deposit box.

Very funny to learn from the government’s filing that:

Fourth, the USAO-SDNY has specific reason to doubt that the seized materials will include the volume and nature of attorney-client communications that Cohen claims. This is because the USAO-
SDNY has already obtained search warrants – covert until this point – on multiple different email accounts maintained by Cohen, and has conducted a privilege review of the materials obtained pursuant to those warrants. The results of that review, as resported by the USAO’s Filter Team, indicate that Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work, and that zero emails were exchanged with President Trump.
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they already had his emails lol
 
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