NPR – Page 18 – * Failed Pols

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, has pleaded guilty to lying with intent to mislead Congress about the timeline of real estate negotiations between Trump and Key Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump, Cohen, and others originally denied that any serious talks about a potential Moscow Trump Tower took place after January of 2016. On Thursday, November 29, however, Michael Cohen said that Trump had still been pursuing a deal in June 2016, when Trump’s presidential campaign was underway.

Trump has repeatedly said that after January 2016, he had “nothing to do with Russia,” and Cohen originally backed him up. On Thursday, however, Cohen admitted that this was not true, thereby raising questions about the veracity of statements by various members of Donald Trump’s family.

Though earlier, Michael Cohen had said that an email he sent the Kremlin regarding a potential real estate deal was never returned, he has now admitted that he did speak with a representative for Vladimir Putin about the deal. Cohen also admitted to an ongoing effort by the Trump Organization to seek Putin’s assistance in facilitating the deal.

On January 11, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

Donald Trump continues to insist that Michael Cohen is lying (now lying about having lied).

Trump also claims not to have known about the Trump Organization’s real estate negotiations with Russia in advance, though Michael Cohen told Congress that he did brief Trump. This, then, brings up questions again about whether Donald Trump knew in advance about the now well-publicized meeting Trump Jr. and some Trump campaign officials planned with Russians who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate.

Trump has said that even if he had pursued the Trump Tower deal with Moscow, he wouldn’t have been breaking any laws. This is almost beside the point, since Cohen’s guilty plea has wider implications than just showing that Cohen himself, as well as Donald Trump, and possibly Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump, have not been truthful in their accounts of their relationship with Russia.

It reinforces the evidence that the Trump Organization was already communicating with Moscow when Moscow was attempting to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It hardly matters whether Michael Cohen is lying now about having lied earlier, or whether he is telling the truth now about his previous lies to cover for Donald Trump; the can of worms has burst open.

Full Panel: Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress | Meet The Press | NBC News [2018-12-02]

Political fallout from Michael Cohen’s new plea deal | Fox News [2018-11-29]

Stacey Abrams believes that not only was there mismanagement in the 2018 Georgia elections, there was deliberate interference. Though she acknowledges that in the current process, her opponent, former secretary of state Brian Kemp, had enough votes to win the election for Georgia’s governor, Stacey Abrams’ fight to end voter suppression in Georgia has only just begun.

“The law as it stands says that he (Kemp) received an adequate number of votes to become the governor of Georgia,” Abrams said. “And I acknowledge the law as it stands…But we know sometimes the law does not do what it should, and that something being legal does not make it right. This is someone who has compromised our Democratic systems, and that is not appropriate.”

Stacey Abrams was referring to the fact that Kemp, as Georgia’s secretary of state, oversaw crucial elements of his own election, and in the time leading up to the election, Kemp and his office worked to delay the processing of new voter registrations, deny many other registrations, and purge voting rolls.

Even though, technically, Kemp was within the law in his efforts to purge voter rolls of names of people who hadn’t voted in years, he has systematically been setting up a system to make voting inaccessible to large groups of people, many of them minorities.

“…I believe it began eight years ago with the systematic disenfranchisement of more than a million voters,” Stacey Abrams said. “It continued with the underfunding and disinvestment in polling places, in training, and in the management of the county delivery of services, and I think it had its pinnacle in this race.”

Brian Kemp, in a massive voter-purge effort, issued a policy that required voter registrations to be an exact signature match to personal identifications. He also changed the status of more than 50,000 voter registrations (90 percent of which belonged to minorities) to “pending.” Though the court enjoined this action before the election, voting was still hindered by events such as underprepared precincts, excessively long voter lines, and voting machine malfunctions.

Though Stacey Abrams lost the gubernatorial election to Brian Kemp, she has vowed to help repair the system in Georgia that allowed “Eight years of systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and incompetence (to have) its desired effect on the electoral process…” Stacey Abrams is confident that those systems can be defeated.

Stacey Abrams: ‘Democracy failed’ in Georgia governor race | CNN [2018-11-18]

Stacey Abrams speaks to supporters | Fox News [2018-11-16]

Category: NPR

Michael Cohen: Trump Says He’s Lying about Lying

Stacey Abrams Vows to Defeat Voter Disenfranchisement