The Cohen Show: Much Ado about Nothing

Nothing that Cohen has to say to Congress nor the questions that they may pose to him has anything to do with politics or crime. It’s another show, a distraction. You have no skin in this game of inside baseball.

Today, February 27, 2018, Michael Cohen is set to testify to Congress and released his opening statement with annexed exhibits. It’s 7:15 AM as I start this and I just read the statement at about 6 AM. I will have to come back and edit and add links after I post this about 9:30 AM.

Here’s the problem I have writing and thinking about Cohen’s testimony: before I try to dissect the testimony itself, based only on the opening statement, I kind of have to dissect the entire US political theater. So, let’s think about the theater first before we consider today’s new production, the Cohen Show.

Today’s looming Congressional Cohen show is supposedly about crime in politics. Here we are considering possible crimes by the president. Yet, there is nothing political about it, if you think politics has to do with the relationship of the citizens to the state. And the real crimes of the US political class are never punished.

The Cohen Show is a distraction and theater. A war crimes investigation would be politics. Impeaching Trump is a distraction and theater. Redistributing wealth is politics.

See the difference?

The Cohen Show is a cover-up of a crime, not the investigation of a crime

Today’s Congressional show has as much to do with politics and crime as a professional wrestling match has to do with sports. The whole show in Congress is just that — a show. Today the political class is avoiding politics, not engaging in politics. Congress is covering up evil, not exposing crimes.

Some people out here in real America actually hope to impeach the president like it’s important. Some support the president and think there is an evil conspiracy against him as if what happens to Trump matters to them. All are of these citizens who care what Cohen says to Congress are dupes.

You, my fellow citizen, have no skin in this game.

We have skin in politics. We live in a fake democracy. If we lived in a real democracy, we would not face an environmental crisis. We would not worry what might happen to our lives and families if we get sick. We would be able to study, grow and learn our whole lives. The mighty and rich would not be so mighty and rich. Wars would be rare and they would eventually end. We could easily access well maintained public lands for recreation. Our food would be nutritious. The rich would pay taxes. We would not worry about the state locking us up for almost nothing while those at the top can commit any crime with impunity. We would be free and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Our children would not have to worry about being the slaves in a corporate, AI, high tech dystopia.

The stuff I talk about here — making this world come into being is politics. Electing and impeaching one group of cronies or pretending like the Constitution of the United States somehow protects or matters to working people in 2019… that’s a show and a distraction.

I would like to impeach the entire political class. It’s all inside baseball. Whether Trump is impeached or not has no bearing on what I consider to be the real work of politics: the arrangement of state power and individual lives.

America is exactly like the parable of the emperor with no clothes. Horrific crime occurs every day. Democracy is nowhere to be seen. If you just look up for a second and turn off the noise machine, you can clearly see and hear the truth.

Did the Trump administration change anything important? The tax cut for the rich was standard Republican fare, with the standard perfunctory Democratic lame pretend opposition. Any Republican president would have passed that legislation. Interference in Venezuela? America has been directly interfering in the internal politics of various nations for generations. The Middle East? America has been putting Israeli interests ahead of the interests of the American people for a long time and playing footsy with killers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere long before Trump came along. Immigration? Maybe the dysfunction of our immigration policy has deteriorated under Trump but he didn’t invent ICE.

The Democrats and that team of inside elites hope Cohen will damage Trump. Really, though, the criminal in this story is the entire Washington establishment, from the national security state to the police state to the kleptocracy.

What are the possible crimes? Remember, Elliot Abrams, current US envoy to Venezuela, materially participated in genocide in Guatemala and evidence to his involvement in mass murder was presented to a court in Guatemala. Yet, he was convicted of lying to Congress and later pardoned by Reagan. A big crime was covered up by adjudicating a small crime.

In the Wikileaks releases of 2016, we read about US support for Al Queda in Syria. There is plenty of evidence of direct falsification of chemical attacks by Assad. Quite likely, American involvement in the Syrian civil war includes numerous domestic and international crimes.

We see many examples of Hillary Clinton’s campaign violating election law. We read that CitiGroup vetted Obama’s cabinet, then received billions in TARP funding. What these revelations should reveal is the 15 trillion dollar transfer of debt from the balance sheets of private entities like CitiGroup and Deutsche bank to the taxpayers of American and Europe was not necessary or good economics. Democrats and Republicans joined together in a bipartisan way to jettison all their neoliberal “market” ideology and have mama government bail out their friends in the banks. They gave them all our money. That should have tipped us off that this is not our government. Where is the Congressional investigation of the massive crime of 2008–9?

So, the elites that are supposed to judge Trump stole 15 trillion dollars for their friends at the banks, killed thousands in Guatemala, Libya, Iraq, etc. But somehow, paying off a hooker is a big deal. God forbid Russia should try to influence an American election. Russia has no business doing that! That’s the job of the banks, CIA, NSA, FBI, Isreal, and oil companies.

In a professional wrestling contest, you sometimes see a character who is designated as the bad guy. If you think about it, if there were any substance to the violence in the show, if people were really hurting each other as they appear to be doing, then the only way to be a good guy would be not to participate. But since the action is pure show, there is no good guy or bad guy, of course, and the outcome makes no difference to the audience. Yet people scream and cheer for one character or another — that’s the fun of it, getting into it and feeling you are part of the action. The same dynamic is at play with the Democrats and Mueller going after Trump.

Cohen’s testimony

Let’s see what Cohen actually says. The statement contains: 1) personal protestation which reads as fairly predictable concern for his own public and self-image; 2) quite clear and damaging allegations about matters in which Cohen has direct and personal involvement, including exhibits; 3) innuendo and speculation about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 campaign that is not backed up with substantial evidence.

Likely, the entire statement was crafted in essence by Mueller, if not directly, to please him in terms of a more lenient sentence. The Russiagate portions of the statement completely lack the specificity and clarity of the hookergate allegations or even Cohen’s clear assertions that Trump is personally racist. Why include speculative, third-hand, hearsay when you have first-hand, direct evidence of a crime?

If you want to impeach Trump, hookergate is sufficient. The Trump tower deal violates the emoluments act. Election laws were clearly violated. Racism is sufficient, in that racism is the worst crime in human history and the term “crimes and misdemeanors” is, according to the Supreme Court, up to Congress to define. If Congress wanted to impeach Trump for election law violations, emolument violations, or racism, they could. Cohen’s testimony would help with all that.

The new allegations in the testimony — scandals we had not heard about — pertain to Trump’s taxes, his scofflaw approach to paying taxes, and his terrible grades and poor SAT scores as a young man. Why then so much focus on the most poorly sourced portion of the Cohen’s information? Ask Mueller, I would think.

Cohen says, “Mr. Trump knew from Roger Stone in advance about the WikiLeaks drop of emails.” There were two Wikileaks releases during the 2016 campaign: one of the DNC material in July, and the second from John Podesta’s gmail account in October. Here Cohen refers to the first of these releases, the DNC release. What Cohen can testify to is that Stone claims to have spoken to Assange and that Trump believed Assange did speak to Stone. The only significant aspect of this pertains to the time, if this communication occurred prior to the actual release to the public.

But why would any of this matter much? We know the DNC emails were legitimately the emails of Democratic party officials and not fakes. Even if Assange spoke to Stone who then passed info to Trump (and we don’t really know any of that based on Cohen’s testimony) that does not have anything to do with how Wikileaks got the emails. In fact, that whole chain has nothing to do with Russia or hacking or whether Seth Rich met Craig Murray in a park in Washington DC or any of that. Assange may have hoped to help Trump win. So what? The emails are legit and Russia probably didn’t steal them.

As to the second release, John Podesta’s email, he did not have two-step verification on his Google account, didn’t change his password even after the whole world had access to his email, left his phone in a taxi, and his password was podesta1234.

Conclusion

Cohen has nothing to say about how Wikileaks got access to Podesta and the DNC’s email because he doesn’t know. Cohen can’t say those emails aren’t legit because they are. He can’t say that Russia had a major influence on our election because it didn’t. You have plenty of grounds to impeach Trump if you want to — so go ahead and leave Russia out of it.

Nothing that will come out of this — impeaching Trump, not impeaching Trump — any of this — has anything to do with politics.

Show’s over.