Tag: michael cohen lawyer

President Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen says the Trump Organization failed to reimburse him for legal fees and damages that arose from his work for the Trumps; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports. FOX News operates the FOX News Channel…

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Susan Glasser of The New Yorker and David Brooks of the The New York Times, about Michael Cohen's testimony and the U.S.-North Korea summit. I think... KELLY: Relief that no bad deal was cut... GLASSER: Correct, that no deal... KELLY: ...That that would be worse than... GLASSER: ...Is better than bad deal. And just because President Trump didn't make a bad deal with North Korea, just because I think most people in both parties do agree that talking even fruitlessly is better than threatening nuclear war, that doesn't mean that this wasn't an enormous embarrassment for the Trump administration and, I think, for the United States. GLASSER: ...Human rights of all kinds, I just don't - I don't see that as a win for the United States. Susan, years from now, will we remember this testimony as a footnote or the moment that winds shifted or as neither of the above? However... KELLY: 'Cause there were so many... GLASSER: Well, exactly. KELLY: David, you came at the testimony this week - your writing in The Times about it - from a moral perspective. Republicans are morally numb about Donald Trump. And every time you stereotype someone, you're ripping at it. KELLY: Words to close the week from The New Yorker's Susan Glasser and The New York Times' David Brooks.

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen begins his marathon week of Capitol Hill testimony with closed-door testimony focusing on whether the Russians could have had any leverage over Trump and on Trump’s finances. Sources tell NBC News Cohen will also spill…

From the Russia probe to the national emergency, it’s been a busy week in American politics. On Tuesday, The Times published an examination of President Trump’s actions that found the president had actively tried to undermine multiple investigations surrounding his administration. The rules governing the special counsel give Mr. Barr considerable flexibility in deciding how much information from the report he provides to Congress and the public. Democratic lawmakers want to ensure that every detail is shared. But Mr. Trump’s plan to build his border wall involves more than his invocation of emergency powers to redirect military construction funds. Additional Reading • Trump Claims His Wall Is Being Built. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and 2016 Democratic primary runner-up whose populist agenda has helped push the party to the left, announced on Tuesday that he was running again. In recent weeks, some Democratic candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, have embraced race-conscious proposals that even the most left-wing elected officials once shied away from — like reparations for slavery. Additional Reading • Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. • How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff • Menendez and Booker, From Newark and the Senate to a Corruption Trial and 2020 Here’s what else happened this week: • Officials in North Carolina ordered a new election for the House race in the Ninth Congressional District after Mark Harris, the Republican whose apparent win is under investigation for voter fraud, called for a new vote himself.

What We’re Following Today It’s Wednesday, January 30. The first day of negotiations to avoid a second government shutdown kicked off today on Capitol Hill, where 17 senators and representatives who have been charged with finding a solution to the impasse over border-wall funding have until February 15 to reach a deal. President Donald Trump said that conferees are “wasting time” if they don’t discuss a physical barrier. Let’s Talk: Michael Cohen’s testimony to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees next month will take place behind closed doors—which means he’ll likely be more forthcoming about Trump and the Trump campaign’s alleged dealings with Russia than he would be during a public testimony, reports Natasha Bertrand. On Tap: Stacey Abrams recently told The Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk II that she’s considering running for a Georgia Senate seat in 2020, or again for its governorship in 2022. Next week, she’ll be the first black woman to deliver a party’s State of the Union rebuttal, and the fact that the Democratic Party has tapped her for the task is a sure sign that it has big plans for her in the future. Still Running Short: The shutdown is over, but many federal workers and their families are still struggling. One federal contractor told The Atlantic’s Joe Pinsker that she’s been forced to ration her children’s asthma medication to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the House approved a pay raise of 2.6 percent for federal workers, after Trump canceled a scheduled 2.1 percent raise in December.

The real villains here aren’t the journalists who pushed for innocent kids to be expelled from school and punched in the face. One of those students, a boy called Nick Sandmann, made the mistake of going on NBC. NBC is fine with people standing around, most people anyway. NBC just doesn’t think that people like Nick Sandmann should stand in place. "And I think a lot of folks were asking the question, when — why do we always do this, in these sorts of cases, when white boys are involved? ... We give privilege to these white kids. The Ivy League professor has far less privilege than Nick Sandmann, who is a Catholic school student from one of the country’s poorest states. Once people start believing that some groups are inherently inferior to other groups — “They have more privilege." People start hating each other. Identity politics will destroy this country faster than a foreign invasion.

Citing threats, President Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen postpones congressional testimony; chief White House correspondent John Roberts reports. #ShepSmith #FoxNews FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and…

In my latest column I try to tackle a peeve of mine going back at least as far as the Clinton scandals: The way issues of character, morality, and public trust get reduced down to narrow criminal questions, and once that happens, equivalencies are drawn between legal infractions. But it’s not just a free-speech issue. How we judge the individuals — and by extension the punishments — should be informed by the content and intent of what they said. As a legal matter you can argue that they should be treated the same, but as a moral or political matter they are very different. This is my problem with Andy’s point about the Obama campaign-finance violation in 2008 and the Michael Cohen-Stormy Daniels payoff story. Over at FoxNews.com Andy writes: In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million – an amount that dwarfs the $280,000 in Cohen’s case – the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute. He is simply bringing it up as an illustration of a larger analytical point. That’s not a legal standard. The question is how much of a political standard it should be. And in the post-Clinton and current Trump era, it doesn’t seem to be a very important standard at all.

New York (CNN)Federal prosecutors said for the first time Friday that Michael Cohen acted at the direction of Donald Trump when the former fixer committed two election-related crimes during the 2016 presidential campaign, as special counsel Robert Mueller outlined a previously undisclosed set of overtures and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals. Those revelations came in a set of court filings in which federal prosecutors in New York said Cohen should receive a "substantial" prison sentence of roughly four years for tax fraud and campaign-finance crimes, and as Mueller's office accused the President's former attorney of lying about his contacts with Russia. Mueller's disclosures also exposed deeper entanglements than previously known between Trump, his campaign apparatus and the Russian government, including that a Russian national who claimed to be well-connected in Moscow spoke with Cohen in 2015 and offered "political synergy" with the Trump campaign. In August, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes after being charged by Manhattan federal prosecutors. In one instance, Cohen spoke in November 2015 to a Russian national who offered "synergy on a government level" to the Trump presidential campaign and "repeatedly proposed" a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to court papers. Mueller's sentencing memo also provided the first explanation of the Trump Tower Moscow project's relevance to Russia's interference during the 2016 campaign. According to the special counsel, Cohen's false statements to investigators about the Trump Tower Moscow project "obscured the fact that the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government." That Cohen continued to work on the Trump Tower Moscow project -- and discuss it with Trump -- was material to both the ongoing congressional and special counsel investigations, prosecutors said, noting in particular that "it occurred at a time of sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the U.S. presidential election." "The defendant amplified his false statements by releasing and repeating his lies to the public, including to other potential witnesses," prosecutors wrote. In the New York federal prosecutors' case, the sentencing guidelines call for a term of 51 to 63 months in prison, and prosecutors on Friday asked the court to "impose a substantial term of imprisonment, one that reflects a modest downward variance from the applicable guidelines range."

A Quinnipiac poll measured Trump’s approval at 38%, down from 41% a month prior. On the bright side for Trump, 70% of voters told Quinnipiac they think the nation’s economy is “excellent” or “good.” Pollsters can be wrong: while national polls in the 2016 election exceeded historical standards for accuracy, there were some significant misses at the state level, and those misses continue to happen. Even with the most recent bad polling numbers, Trump’s average approval rating sits at 40.0%, right in his sweet spot. The only other president to fall short of 50% approval so early in his presidency was Bill Clinton, who notched 44% approval in 1993 before winning re-election. What the turnout factor is for millennials, what the turnout factor is for people of color, really has a massive impact Celinda Lake “The single hardest thing in the polling – and it’s turning out to be very complicated so far this year – is to figure out who’s actually going to turn out to vote,” she said. For example, national polls were on the money in the 2016 presidential election: Clinton was meant to win the popular vote by about three points. “For example in 2014, millennials and people of color didn’t turn out to vote, so if you’re basing your turnout model on the past, then you’re going to be wrong. When there is a Democrat in the White House, the GOP advantage grows a few points more. Read more Democrats have performed well in contests since Trump was elected, easily winning two gubernatorial elections in 2017 and outperforming the baseline in special elections that year. As a result, Republicans gained control of the Senate and, counting state legislatures and governorships, cemented their largest majority nationally going back almost 100 years.