Robinson: Maybe no ‘smocking gun’ yet, but Trump’s in trouble

According to Cohen — and common sense — the purpose of paying $150,000 to McDougal (via American Media Inc. chairman David Pecker) and $130,000 to Daniels was to keep their accounts of their alleged relationships with Trump from being made public before the election. That means the payments have to be considered illegal, unreported campaign contributions.

Trump suggests these were mere technical violations of the kind that every campaign inadvertently commits and is fined for. That is a lie. Permit me to quote the prosecutors’ memo at length:

“Cohen’s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for president of the United States struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency. … He did so by orchestrating secret and illegal payments to silence two women who otherwise would have made public their alleged extramarital affairs with (Trump). In the process, Cohen deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election. It is this type of harm that Congress sought to prevent when it imposed limits on individual contributions to candidates.”

And Cohen committed these crimes, prosecutors say, on Trump’s orders.

“NO COLLUSION,” Trump claimed once again in his Monday tweets. He has spent months trying to convince the nation of two false premises: that special counsel Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt” has found no evidence of a conspiracy between his campaign and the Russian government; and that any other alleged crimes that investigators might come across are somehow irrelevant.

Wrong on both counts.

Potential obstruction

There was, of course, the infamous Trump Tower meeting arranged so that Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign chairman could receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton from an emissary of the Kremlin. But investigators have also learned of more than a dozen additional contacts between the campaign and well-connected Russians.

None of this is normal. I know people who have run both Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, and not one reports ever hearing of such dealings with a foreign government. When Trump says this sort of thing is common practice, he is lying.

No, Mueller has not tipped his hand to reveal all the evidence he might have of a full-fledged plot between Trump’s campaign and Vladimir Putin’s government. But given how tight-lipped the Mueller team has been, it is ridiculous for anyone to assert with confidence that no such evidence exists.

We know Mueller is looking into the Trump Organization’s dealings with Russians who have close links to the Kremlin. We know he is looking into potential obstruction of justice by the president.

And now we know, for the first time, that prosecutors have directly implicated Trump in a federal crime. It may be a bit premature to start chanting, “Lock him up!” But stay tuned.