The Mueller Bombshell That Wasn’t

Is this really all they've got?

Special counsel Robert Mueller and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed sentencing memos for President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen on Friday. Despite Cohen’s cooperation with the special counsel investigation, prosecutors recommended the disgraced lawyer serve 51 to 63 months in prison.

President Trump’s opponents, who eagerly awaited the memos as #MuellerFriday trended on Twitter for hours ahead of the filings, are likely to be disappointed with their findings. The Southern District linked Trump to Cohen’s payments to women who claimed to have had an affair with the president, concluding, “Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1 [Donald Trump].” However, even this implied violation of campaign finance law rings hollow after prosecutors failed to convict ex-Senator John Edwards on a far clearer cut version of this charge in 2012, to say nothing of Trump's long history of similar payouts to women, making it difficult to prove these were campaign-specific and not just business-as-usual at the Trump Organization.

More