Paying for nondisclosure agreements for perfectly legal activities is not a crime, and squeezing guilty pleas out of vulnerable witnesses does not change those facts, according to Mark Penn, who served as an adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2000, including during his impeachment.
Writing an opinion piece in The Hill, Penn said that the investigations into Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, as well as his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, “were never anything other than an attempt to push into a corner as many Trump aides and family members as possible and shake them down until they could get close enough to Trump to try to take him down.”
The plot to get Trump out of office thickens, Penn maintains, “as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals of Trump meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment.”
Penn said that it makes no sense that Trump spent $130,000 to keep secret a personal story “and the full weight of state prosecutors comes down on his lawyer, tossing attorney–client privilege to the wind, [while] Democrats spend potentially millions on secret opposition research and no serious criminal investigation occurs.”
No doubt that Trump should do a better job of picking aides, Penn conceded, but emphasized that does not make him responsible for their financial problems and crimes.
He stressed that the hour-by-hour scrutiny of so many of Trump’s aides, lawyers and actions in the campaign and in the White House are merely “to find anything that could be colored into a crime, leaving far behind the original Russia-collusion theory as the fake pretext it was.”
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