3 Reasons This Week’s Michael Cohen Story Might Not End Up Being That Important; And 3 Reasons It Might Turn Out To Be Huge
Even Though It’s Arguably The 2nd Most Fascinating Story Of The Week After Iran, This Part Of The Trump Saga Could Very Well Amount To Very Little. But Also, Maybe Not…
At the very least, it’s continuing to cause major embarrassment for some major CEOs who paid good chunks of money to Cohen in exchange for…what exactly? (Proving the White House isn’t the only organization with vetting issues). And Cohen seems to be in it deep.
But in terms of its impact on the President himself, it may not turn out to be that big a deal. Here are a few possible reasons why:
1. This particular scandal is still more than a safe distance from Trump himself. Just because his long-time personal lawyer seemed to be running a little scam on corporations, where he may have gotten them to pay for influence he didn’t have, doesn’t implicate the President in anything. At least not yet.
2. Lots of people (and companies) pay people just because they know people. So while fascinating, there may be nothing about this that’s illegal. (Although it does raise a question in our minds: if these big corporations have millions lying around to throw around on a Trump crony they must’ve known was sketchy at best (otherwise Trump would’ve brought him along to the White House), why did they need those huge tax cuts so badly?)
3. There’s no longer any real storyline about where the money taken in by Cohen went. When reports of the corporate payments first came out, there seemed to be an effort to represent the money raised by Cohen from AT&T, pharmaceutical company Novartis, etc., as the foundation of a slush fund to pay off women with whom Trump was entangled. That was because Cohen collected and processed the cash he received from corporations through the same shell company that was used for his pay-offs to porn stars, playmates, etc. But the numbers now seem to have far eclipsed that. Pointing to an equally likely scenario: Cohen was just lazy. He figured he already had this shell company, he might as well “double-duty” it for this stuff too.
