Michael Cohen: Caught Throwing Spit Balls
By
Leonard Zwelling
The spectacle of a lesser mob boss coming clean in front of Congress was not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not all that unusual either. Think Joe Valachi, 1963.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nEQgbgi0yA
On Wednesday, February 27, Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers and his “fixer” testified to the awful things that he had done in the name of his former boss, the current President of the United States. He might as well have been confessing to putting glue in Sally’s hair.
His testimony did not reveal all that much new. Sure, Mr. Trump did have knowledge of the WikiLeaks dump of the stolen Clinton emails before he asked the Russians to release them. Yes, Mr. Trump’s flouting of campaign finance laws followed him into the White House as he was still signing checks to reimburse Mr. Cohen for his payment to Stormy Daniels for her silence long after Trump took the oath of office.
But, the big payoff, evidence of criminal collaboration and conspiracy with the Russians was missing. Most of the rest, we had heard already, just not from the kid in the back row who just got caught throwing spit balls and now is showing remorse. Give me a break. If Cohen did all he said he did he deserves to go to prison for a lot more than three years and Congress ought to subpoena Allen Weisselberg tomorrow and get to the bottom of all of this. I expect the Southern District of New York’s attorneys are doing just that.
Then there is the Republican minority defending this president by calling the spit ball thrower dirty names. “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” Where was “sticks and stones?” The Silent Majority has become the infantile minority.
The whole scene was an embarrassment played out for the TV cameras. There was real human drama. I suspect Mr. Cohen is really sorry, especially for what he has put his family through, but what about what he put us through? And what he put all of Mr. Trump’s business associates through who he managed to cheat in one way or another? It simply is hard to feel sorry for the teary-eyed man who spent ten years of his life being a bag man for a mob boss who managed to convince less than half of America that what we needed was Don Corleone with orange hair in the White House.
On the bright side, however, this well may be the beginning. Perhaps some of the Trump supporters are beginning to understand that they have been hoodwinked into supporting a crime figure with a vast empire of family-run tentacles that may really be a financial house of cards that is starting to collapse.
All Donald Trump wants is attention. Now, he gets it 24/7 and is happy as a clam. My guess is that he probably has had enough of having to actually do something for a living rather than bilk people out of their money and act like a cad.
I am not sure that the Cohen testimony really tightened the noose on Mr. Trump all that much. Many of the subsequent interviews with his voters find them not to be wavering in their support for the president. It will take the SDNY to find the real evidence of criminal activity in the finances of the Trump Organization so that all the sons and daughters can be brought to justice and then the godfather himself can be sent back to Manhattan or to prison.
This may have been a tiny step. It’s a start. But only a start. There’s a long way to go.
