POLITICS President Trump: 100+ Mornings After (Term 1 Complete)

The person was not willing to elaborate. But was commenting on the fact that Gulliani was claiming the tape was exculpatory. This source said he had listened to the tape and that it would challenge the Trump legal team - not clear if that is just around the timeline of when he knew or what he knew - or bigger related to source of funds. My guess is former.

 

Fourth - Trump took sides with Putin while throwing US Intelligence under the bus.

 

I think it may also be important if someone else made the payments to protect the campaign.

 

Hell - that’s one.

 

What would be easy to find?

 

I think you don’t understand the issue.

 

I read an behaviorial article a while back related to political truth/lies and how our political bias affects how we view or accept/reject said lies. I may not have it exact quoted but I thought it captured the environment.

"A little imagination can apparently make a lie feel “truthy” enough to give the liar a bit of a pass."

 

The one payment that was made illegally?

 

Why does the payment have to be made illegally for it to matter, unless we’ve just come so far as to not care about such behavior from our leaders?

 

I'm surprised these recording haven't leaked yet. Would be interesting to hear them.

 

I would think illegally definitely gets him impeached.

 

Nato, putting down allies, hail putin, Russia made erybody vote for Trump, etc, etc. I got it. Sums up the last 18 months very simply.

 

I’m still failing to understand why it has to get that far for it to resonate.

 

Ah, just another “informed” Trump voter.

 

Not surprised

 

Ah, but you are misinformed. Didnt vote for him.

 

Dear god, he's going to ride this issue as long as he can. Now trying to dictate rules to the NFL.

 

We’ll see. He’ll likely have a round two.

 

According to The Washington Post's reporting (out of respect for float & to not make him waste time deleting whatever he has to delete when someone links an article to The Post, I won't link said article), Trump didn't directly pay McDougal. He & Cohen, how would Rudy Guliani put it, "funneled" the payment through AMI, the publisher of The National Inquirer whose CEO (David Pecker) is a longtime Trump ally and is also a subject of investigation in the greater Michael Cohen investigation being ran out of SDNY for burying damaging stories to Trump and getting approval before running positive/neutral stories on Trump. The scheme was for AMI to purchase McDougal's story and bury it. McDougal gave The Inquirer exclusive rights to the story in exchange for said tabloid to publish some work she had or was going to do.

That's the problem. Trump knowingly conspired, through Cohen, with AMI to silence the story; thus, creating a rational nexus to believe a criminal conspiracy, as it relates to campaign finance laws, occurred. Not surprisingly, when The Wall Street Journal, a publication with an established conservative reputation, ran a story about the McDougal/AMI/Trump conspiracy shortly before the 2016 election, the official Trump Campaign spokesperson and later White House Communications Director, Hope Hicks, issued an official statement for the campaign denying any knowledge whatsoever of the McDougal, via AMI, to, as the industry calls it, "catch & kill" McDougal's story on her affair with Trump in 2006 & 2007. Also unsurprisingly, the Cohen tape of the conversation proves that statement was an outright lie.

So what's the big deal? Happens all the time, right? After all, don't all politicians do this? Well, no. According to CNN,

The same problem exists for the Stormy Daniels payments. Now, full disclosure, if either of the payments would have been made anyway regardless of campaign, it could not be campaign finance related. That has been Guliani's assertions all during the Stormy Daniels deal. There's at least a couple of problems with that assertion both related to time.

1. Both affairs occured in the 2006-2007 timeframe. 2. Both payments were arranged and executed in the waning days of the 2016 campaign.

To believe Guliani's argument that the payments were completely unrelated to Trump's presidential campaign because they would have been paid anyway to, say, avoid family problems, one must believe that 9 to 10 years after the affairs BOTH women, who to my knowledge knew nothing about each other's affair with Trump, decided they were going public with their stories at essentially the same time. Keep in mind, not only did they decide at the same time, they also decided to spill the beans a decade later. If one buys into that highly improbable argument, for one to believe it wasn't related to the campaign, one would also have to buy into the assertion that both women coming forward when they did had absolutely nothing to do with the fact Trump was in the waning days of a bitterly fault presidential run. Also, one would have to believe that the payments had absolutely nothing to do with trying to prevent 2 more salacious stories about women (after the Access Hollywood "grab them by the [ussy pay]" story) from hitting the press in the very last days before voting.

Those determinations could be reached, I guess, but only if one applied some Olympic gold medal levels of mental gymnastics and threw common sense completely out the window.

So that in a not so short nutshell is why the McDougal/Daniels hush money payments are an issue, very likely a legal issue.

 

Maybe this will help:

The media should be held to an ethical standard.

The President of the United States should be held to a lower ethical standard.

Did I nail it?