Dear Commons Community,
Donald Trump’s legal problems must really be getting bad when Fox News’ chief legal analyst, Andrew Napolitano, goes on the air to say that Trump is in deep trouble because of the payments of hush money to women who claimed they had sexual affairs with the President. Napolitano was on the air in the morning and again in the evening on Fox News commenting that Donald Trump’s legal woes are likely just beginning and that the sentencing of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on Wednesday is sure to cause trouble for the president. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for multiple violations, including breaking campaign finance law. Prosecutors said Trump directed Cohen to make the hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election.
“A very, very telling statement came out of the judge’s mouth yesterday … and that was about the president,” Napolitano, a former judge, said on “Fox & Friends.” “The judge finding that the president ordered and paid for Michael Cohen to commit a crime. That is very telling.”
Trump denied telling Cohen to break the law, as “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy noted. Cohen made a “damage control payment” and not an illegal campaign payment, Doocy said, paraphrasing Trump.
“I understand the president’s argument,” Napolitano said. “Unfortunately, the court and the prosecutors who work for the president disagree with him.”
Napolitano argued that if payments made on behalf of Trump to cover up alleged affairs were misreported or filed incorrectly, they could have been corrected. But that’s not what happened.
“If you do this as part of a scheme, to try to hide it, then it’s not a civil wrong, then it’s a crime. That’s what the judge found yesterday,” Napolitano said.
Earlier Thursday, Napolitano published an op-ed piece on Fox News’ website asserting that Trump is “directly in the legal crosshairs of federal prosecutors” based on sentencing memorandums for Cohen and Paul Manafort, who is Trump’s former campaign chairman.
Napolitano argued that based on those memorandums, the scope of Trump’s legal trouble goes beyond these hush-money payments.
“The president may want the public to think that none of this troubles him,” he wrote. “Yet the evidence of the falsity of his publicly denied proximity to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin during the campaign and the possession of evidence by the Department of Justice of his pre-presidential criminal behavior are gravely serious, and he cannot reasonably pretend that they are not.”
Napolitano was on Bret Bair’s evening news report again on Thursday night repeating his comments in the op-ed.
Napolitano’s airtime may indicate a crack developing in the Trump/Fox News relationship even though the President had a softball interview with Fox News’ Harris Faulkner earlier in the day during which he desperately defended himself in light of his legal liabilities.
Tony
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