Friday on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said the Michael Cohen sentencing memo was prosecutors saying President Donald Trump “committed a felony.”
Katyal said, “The big news tonight is not about Michael Cohen, it’s not about Paul Manafort, it’s about one person, Donald Trump, and this filing that you just started to highlight that was made today in the Michael Cohen case really does––for the first time you have federal prosecutors essentially saying that Donald Trump committed a felony.”
He continued, “This is not a document by Mueller, that filed by Trump’s own Justice Department, by the Southern District prosecutors in New York and there are three pieces to the claim. The first piece is the one you just read which is from page 11 of the filing which says that Cohen made these campaign finance payments at the direction of Trump, and we’re talking about payments made for two women for having alleged affairs with Trump and they were going to go public and what happened was Cohen paid those folks and did so in a time when you’re only supposed to give $2700 to a campaign, and that’s it for a very important reason. Congress said we don’t want rich people buying elections, we want transparency in our election process so in page 11 the Southern District prosecutors say no, that was done at the direction of Trump.”
He added, “Then page 12, prosecutors say the agreement’s principal purpose was to suppress this woman’s story so as to prevent the story from influence the election, so they’re taking away the Trump defense which was in the Edwards case, I was doing it to protect my private life. They’re saying no this was done with the purpose of influencing the election then page 23, a long description by the prosecutors of how serious this violation of the campaign finance laws are, how it strikes a blow to our democracy. There’s some pretty soaring language in there. You put things together. The Southern District federal prosecutors are alleging the president committed a felony. They’re not indicting him. He has any number of defenses available to him, but that’s a document I haven’t seen in my lifetime.”
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