President Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen has flipped, starting to sing like a bird to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. And what does the oh-so shocking tune that has got the media all aflutter amount to, boiled down?
The world’s most famous real-estate developer, who apparently owns or controls more than 500 businesses in a couple of dozen countries, sought to develop real-estate in the world’s largest country: Russia.
It’s a scandal right up there with “World’s fastest sprinter sprints in China” and “Our time’s best boxer may box in Russia.” Big countries attract bigwigs with big ideas. It’s collusion, alright.
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Of course, Cohen himself is in a spot of trouble. He lied to Congress by saying that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow had ended by January 2016 — whereas they continued well into the presidential campaign — and by denying that he spoke to Trump about them. This is what’s known as a “process crime” and it could mean jail time for Cohen, who already has pled guilty to violating campaign-finance laws and is being investigated for alleged crimes relating to his personal business dealings.
“Cohen said he lied to be in sync with Donald Trump’s political messaging,” writes the Independent Sentinel. This certainly is a problem for Cohen since his name isn’t John Brennan, James Clapper, or Jim Comey, all of whom lied to Congress and who, apparently, are too big to fail (video below).
It’s also what today they like to call “bad optics” for Trump, but it’s no crime. This didn’t stop Bloomberg Opinion (hey, everyone has one, right?) from stating in a bold headline, “A Clear Link Between Trump and Russia Is Now Out in the Open.”
Again, though, this is like saying there was a clear link between Olympic runner Jesse Owens and Nazi Germany because, well, he ran there in 1936. The best at what they do often do what they do all over the world.
Bloomberg writes that “it remains significant that those [real estate] negotiations were happening with Putin’s office directly, not just with real estate developers in Moscow.” Does it?
Russia isn’t the United States. It’s possible that no large business deals are beyond Putin’s purview, and there may be practices considered routine in his nation that are illegal here. It may prove problematic for Trump if involvement in such a thing emerges in the future, which could happen. As Stalin underling Lavrentiy Beria infamously said, after all, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” But this remains to be seen.
Bloomberg does admit the truth, writing in its last of 27 paragraphs that “Cohen’s latest revelations on their own don’t constitute evidence of a crime or impeachable offense by Trump.” Translation: This is still a big nothingburger — but it’s red meat for our base and, hey, we got you to read.
A more honest assessment was provided by liberal Piers Morgan, whose Daily Mail headline reads, “Mueller has tortured enough minnows and made enough noise but if he hasn’t got the goods to nail Trump the whale by now he should shut up shop and go home.” Adding perspective, he writes:
Donald Trump has never made any secret that he enjoys doing business with Russians.
When I interviewed him for GQ magazine in 2008, he told me how he’d recently made a $60 million profit on a house in Florida way.
‘I have stuff they (Russians) want to buy,’ he said. ‘I bought a house in Palm Beach for $40 million and just sold it to a Russian for $100 million. They’re very smart, very cunning business people. They know great assets when they see them. And they know exactly what they’re doing when they hand me a big fat check. I am getting a good price but in five years I will probably regret it.’
That house sale was ten years ago, and was well publicized in the media at the time.
As a testimonial to the Big Lie technique’s power, however, even Morgan allows that maybe, perhaps, Trump colluded with Russia — to do something impossible: fix the 2016 election. We may as well wonder if he colluded with Darth Putin to conquer the far side of the Universe or colluded with the Kremlin to flap his arms and fly to the moon.
Forgotten, apparently, is that no one contends votes were changed by Russia or that this is even possible. Of course, leftists used to say that “the Russians hacked the election!” which only ever meant one of two things. First, that the Russkies might have provided Wikileaks with the Democratic National Committee emails, which constituted the unpardonable sin of exposing the Democrats’ deception.
Second, it could reference Russian cyber-attacks on our election systems. But such intrusion is nothing new. “Foreign spy agencies routinely try to collect information on U.S. elections,” wrote CNN in 2016, and Russians and other foreign entities “hacked” election systems in 2012, too. Note that Barack Obama won that year. Did the Russians also steal the election for him?
Now we have the “fixed” folderol. Absent from most of the coverage is that the Russians’ influence amounted to $150,000-worth of Facebook ads, which reflected both conservative and liberal messages because they were designed to sow division, as even left-wing USA Today reported earlier this year.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the power of Facebook itself, which, along with Google, warned an expert in August, has the power to shift “upwards of 12 million votes.” But since those votes are shifted in the “right” (read: left) direction, we hear crickets.
Note that when Trump said in a 2016 presidential debate that he might not accept the election outcome’s validity (alluding to vote fraud), Hillary Clinton accused him of “denigrating” our “democracy.” Barack Obama had said that our voting systems were secure and that the Russians were just trying to disrupt our system. Yet since Clinton lost, she and other Democrats have done nothing but denigrate our system, screaming about how the election was fixed — and doing the Russians’ bidding by disrupting our system.
As for trumping Trump, we never know what tomorrow may bring. But that the world’s biggest real-estate developer wanted to do business in the world’s biggest country is neither surprising nor a crime. Unfortunately, though, the disruptors will make sure it remains a story.
