Michael Cohen: "I Fear That If He Loses The Election In 2020 There Will Never Be A Peaceful Transition Of Power"

On Saturday, while Bernie was kicking off his 2020 campaign with a speech of substance, hope and love in Brooklyn, Trump was delivering a hateful scorched-earth address to the far right radical fringe of American politics, "calling the Russia investigation 'bullshit,' adopting a southern accent to mock his former attorney general, and asserting that some members of Congress 'hate our country.'"

The rollicking two-hour-plus appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland offered the president a brief respite from an otherwise miserable week in which his much-touted summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ended in failure and his former personal lawyer delivered explosive testimony to Congress.

A new HarrisX poll for The Hill showed mixed results regarding Michael Cohen's testimony to the House Oversight Committee last week. Survey registered voters, 39% of respondents had no opinion, 37% found his testimony credible and 25% said they did not find him credible. It doesn't matter that much that 58% of Democrats found him credible but that only 15% of Republicans did. What is important is that self-identified independent voters-- most of whom (48%) were unsure-- were significantly more likely to believe Cohen (35%) than to dismiss his testimony as not credible (just 18%).

Yesterday, the NY Times published an interesting piece of the evolving historical record, an OpEd by John Dean: I Testified Against Nixon. Here's My Advice For Michael Cohen. He noted that both Cohen and himself "found ourselves speaking before Congress, in multiple open and closed venues, about criminal conduct of a sitting president of the United States. This is not a pleasant place to be, particularly given the presidents involved.

Polls varied widely after my testimony. One said 50 percent of Americans believed me, 30 percent did not, and 20 percent were not sure. Another poll had 38 percent believing the president, who denied my statement, and 37 percent believing me. The instant polls on Mr. Cohen’s testimony vary by party affiliation, as was the case with my polls. But 35 percent found him credible. I believe that number will grow.

While my testimony was eventually corroborated by secret recordings of our conversations made by Mr. Nixon, before that it was other witnesses who made the difference. I was surprised by the number of people who surfaced to support my account. The same, I suspect, will happen for Michael Cohen. The Mafia’s code of omertà has no force in public service. I have heard no one other than Roger Stone say he will go to jail for Donald Trump.

Mr. Cohen should understand that if Mr. Trump is removed from office, or defeated in 2020, in part because of his testimony, he will be reminded of it for the rest of his life. He will be blamed by Republicans but appreciated by Democrats. If he achieves anything short of discovering the cure for cancer, he will always live in this pigeonhole. How do I know this? I am still dealing with it.

Just as Mr. Nixon had his admirers and apologists, so it is with Mr. Trump. Some of these people will forever be rewriting history, and they will try to rewrite it at Mr. Cohen’s expense. They will put words in his mouth that he never spoke. They will place him at events at which he wasn’t present and locations where he has never been. Some have tried rewriting my life, and they will rewrite his, too.

I am thinking of people like Mr. Stone, the longtime Trump associate who worked on the 1972 Nixon campaign and so admires the former president that he has a tattoo of the man’s likeness between his shoulder blades. Mr. Stone, whom I never met while at the White House, has been indicted as part of the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, on charges of lying to Congress about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign.

He prides himself as a political dirty trickster, and he has never met a conspiracy theory he did not believe. Mr. Cohen can be sure that Mr. Stone will promote new conspiracy theories to defend Mr. Trump and himself, even if it means rewriting history. Presidential scandals tend to attract a remarkable number of dishonest “historians.”

There is one overarching similarity that Mr. Cohen and I share. He came to understand and reject Mr. Trump as I did Mr. Nixon.



Mr. Nixon first called on me regarding Watergate some eight months after the arrests of his re-election committee operatives at the Watergate. We had 37 conversations, and when I felt I had his confidence, I tried but failed to get him to end the cover-up. The day I told Mr. Nixon there was a cancer on his presidency was the day I met the real Nixon. I knew I had to break rank.

Mr. Cohen has likewise come to see Mr. Trump for his true nature. At the very end of his testimony before the House Oversight Committee, he sought permission to read a closing statement.

He thanked the members, and again accepted responsibility for his bad behavior. He then told the legislators, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.” This was the most troubling-- actually, chilling-- thing he said in his five hours before the committee.

Since Mr. Cohen’s warning came in his closing words, there was no opportunity for committee members to ask follow-up questions. So I double-checked with his lawyer, Lanny Davis, if I had understood Mr. Cohen’s testimony correctly. Mr. Davis responded, “He was referring to Trump’s authoritarian mind-set, and lack of respect for democracy and democratic institutions.”

Indeed, what is most similar about my and Mr. Cohen’s testimony is that we both challenged authoritarian presidents of the United States by revealing their lies and abuses of power. Mr. Trump is the first authoritarian president since Mr. Nixon, and neither he nor his supporters will play fair. Mr. Cohen will be dealing with these people the rest of his life.

In fact, all Americans are affected by the growing authoritarianism that made Mr. Trump president. These people who facilitated his rise will remain long after Mr. Trump is gone. We need to pay more attention.

Like Fathers... Like Sons-- Or Worse

John Sarbanes, a progressive 40-year-old, nose-to-the-grindstone Maryland Democratic congressman, is kind of the odd man out when it comes to congressional offspring. John represents a district, the 3rd, once represented by his father, Senator Paul Sarbanes. John an alum of Princeton and Harvard, is widely considered a serious, thoughtful, hardworking Rep., very different from most of the sons of a congressional parent. Yesterday a far more typically incompetent son of an already grotesquely incompetent former congressional dad-- Ben Quayle/Brock Landers-- gave his maiden speech on the House floor, before hitching a ride on Air Force 1 and accompanying the gracious man he called, in a distinctly reptilian manner, "the worst president in history" just a few months ago. Already tied for the 354th worst member of Congress, Quayle/Landers can boast a perfect zero score in every single category surveyed by Progressive Punch since he took the oath of office. There's no reason to believe he will ever go beyond the zero mark.

Of course Quayle/Landers and Sarbanes are hardly the only fortunate sons to have followed their father's footsteps into Congress. Rand Paul (R-KY) already disgraced his family name by pointing out that-- qualified after self-certifying himself as an eye doctor-- that right-wing terrorist Jared Loughner is a paranoid schizophrenic, although his rambling "philosophy" sounds shockingly like the philosophy of the Paul Family. And, like the Pauls, he's even a fan of the lunatic fringe author Rand was named for, Ayn Rand.

Yesterday's L.A. Times pointed out that experts tend to agree "that several oft-repeated phrases and concepts-- his fixation on grammar conspiracies, currency and the "second United States Constitution"-- seem derived from concepts explored with regularity among elements of the far right. 'What you can see across the board in his writings is the idea that you can't trust the government-- that the government engages in mind control against its citizens,' said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long monitored the radical right. Loughner's assertion that he would not 'pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver' is a running theme among right-wing opponents of the Federal Reserve system," and is the ultimate in the Paultardism shared by father and son.

Funny enough, it was a piece in the NY Times last week about how badly Andrew Cuomo is going wrong, that got me thinking about how political kids should not generally be encouraged to go into the family business. Mario Cuomo was never in Congress but he was an exceptional governor of New York. His son promises to be among the worst in the state's history, for working families and for the Democratic Party. And there's an endless list of godawful Democratic sons far worse than accomplished fathers-- Dan Boren (OK) and Mark Pryor (AR) especially stand out-- as well as some who are competing with already mediocre or awful parents, like Dan Lipinski (IL) and Kendrick Meek (FL), the first child to follow a congressional mother into the House. In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell points to the headstarts in the family business-- what he calls the "10,000 hour rule"-- that give offspring a headstart on mastering their parent's jobs.

In 1929 Paul John Kvale followed former Minnesota Congressman Ole Juulson Kvale into the House, a mention of which I stumbled across in a story I found in an old issue of Time Magazine, that was actually urging Minnesotans to elect another son of a Congressman, pro-Nazi fly-boy Charles Lindbergh. The story starts off on the right foot-- "primogeniture and hereditary public office have no place in U. S. tradition"-- and then almost immediately veers off into an ominous direction.

This fact, however, did not last week deter the voters of the 7th Minnesota District from electing by a two-to-one majority Paul John Kvale (pronounced "Ka-volley") of Benson to the Congressional seat for six years occupied by his father, the Rev. Ole John Kvale, whose charred body was last month found in his burned summer cottage (TIME, Sept. 23). Like his father whom he, the eldest of six sons, served as secretary in Washington, Son Kvale was chosen as a Farmer-Laborite and will be the sole representative of that party in the House. The new Congressman is an engaging young man, thoroughly Nordic in appearance, thoroughly accommodating in manner.

The Congressional District adjoining Son Kvale's in Minnesota might offer a spectacular opportunity for the perpetuation of another father & son tradition in U. S. politics. From that district came the late Congressman Charles Augustus Lindbergh, father of official No. 1 U. S. Hero. The late Congressman Lindbergh left his seat in 1917. Son Lindbergh then lacked ten years of the constitutional age (25) for House membership. Many have been the suggestions that Hero Lindbergh should now attempt to succeed to his father's old seat in Congress. Against these suggestions arise three mighty obstacles: 1) Col. Lindbergh lacks a Minnesota residence. 2) Short, smiling Harold Knutson who took the Lindbergh seat a dozen years ago is firmly entrenched in the Republican organization of the House where he serves Speaker Longworth as whip (chief aide-de-camp) and from which he has no desire to be dislodged even by Hero No. 1 of the U. S. 3) Lindbergh Sr. made his political reputation as a radical. Col. Lindbergh has comfortable, conservative political views, if any. Many another son has followed his father into high office. Only one President's son has become President (John Adams-- John Quincy Adams); only one President's grandson has become President (William Henry Harrison-- Benjamin Harrison). But two Senators' sons now sit in the Senate: Frederick Hale of Maine whose sire was the late great Eugene Hale (1836-1918) and Robert Marion La Follette of Wisconsin, the Peter Pannish offspring of sturdy "Battle Bob" (1855-1925). In the House today is found a rare grandfather-father-son tradition of service in the ancient and honorable family of Tucker from Virginia. Henry St. George Tucker (1780-1848) served in the 14th and 15th Congress. His chief distinction: a tirade and a vain vote in 1816 against increased pay for Congressmen which he refused to take himself. John Randolph Tucker (1823-1897) served from the 44th to the 50th Congress. Henry St. George Tucker, 76, is now serving his ninth noncontinuous Congressional term since 1889. His chief distinction: a tirade and a vote in 1927 against increased pay for Congressmen which, according to family tradition, he refuses to take himself.

Time had a different paragraph policy back then. I'm shocked they didn't mention any Frelinghuysens. Today Rodney P. Frelinghuysen represents New Jersey's wealthiest district (the 11th)-- second most affluent congressional district in the U.S.-- but starting in 1793, four Frelinghuysens represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate and Rodney's father, Peter Hood Ballantine Frelinghuysen, Jr., was elected to Congress in 1952 and served until his retirement in 1974. In 2000 Michael Moore tried to get a potted plant (a ficus) on the ballot as Frelinghuysen's opponent.

Recently Illinois voters were smart enough to reject the uber corrupt son of uber-corrupt former Congressman (and House Speaker) Denny Hastert. It looks like the fix is already in though to make Harry Reid's son a Member of Congress from Nevada's new aborning congressional district (in return for making Joe Heck's swing district more Republican-friendly). Probably the worst case of a son taking a House seat on his father's name is Dan Boren, a slow-witted and craven Blue Dog who represents eastern Oklahoma. His father, David Boren, was a popular governor and U.S. Senator (and closet case) and his grandfather, Lyle Boren, a far right anti-union kook, also represented the area. Presumably because the two of them were Democrats, the ultra-conservative Dan, has maintained pro-forma ties to that party, although he votes more frequently with the GOP and was George Bush's favorite Democrat.

The NY Election: Andrew Cuomo Finally Enters the Spotlight, and What Do We See?

Luckily for Democrats, the Republicans are 

bound to nominate even worse candidates.

I was born in New York; raised there too. Went to SUNY Stony Brook. Even after I came back from living overseas for nearly seven years, I moved right to Manhattan. One of my sisters lives in Brooklyn, and one lives on Staten Island. I had an office in NY for many years and split my time between New York and California. Ken lives there. So do dozens of other friends and relatives. One of them asked me to publish this anonymously so as not to be the target of any retribution. -- Howie

The NY State election has finally come out from the shadows into the open
 
Andrew Cuomo, the "Big Guy," has finally come out from self-enforced hibernation in the AG's office. He's the son of the Liberal Lion; he's the one who, when you close your eyes, you don’t know if it's his or Mario Cuomo's voice.
 
But he is going to campaign and govern in his own voice. And he too, like many other Democrats-- too many other Democrats-- thinks that the electorate is anti-incumbent rather than anti-ineffective. So he's designed for the moment to exempt himself from that incumbency by having an ambivalent relationship with his own party.
 
He has also pushed for things that many parts of the traditional Democratic coalition do not support. Like more charter schools, which use public money to support schools that "succeed" because they cherry-pick the kids who can succeed and leave the tough cases to the public schools. Stacking the deck has always increased the odds of success in your favor.  
 
When David Paterson was still running for reelection, he decided the only way he could get reelected was to run against his own Democratic legislators. To some degree-- for the moment?-- Andrew has charted the same kind of course. 
 
Given the situation with Paterson, Andrew Cuomo’s popularity as AG has been a godsend for Democrats. He has been a fine AG, continuing the broad view of the office begun by Democratic AG Bob Abrams in the '90s, and the driven, aggressive and principled voice of Eliot Spitzer when he was the best AG in America.

Democrats have been hoping to use that to help elect Democrats all up and down the ballot. It is crucial in this cycle to not only help the Senate stay Democratic but to enlarge its majority. Had a larger Democratic majority been elected in 2008, the June 2009 coup, the one that put the Senate's competence and "corruption" on display, would never have happened.
 
If Andrew Cuomo continues to run against his own party, it would make winning more seats in the Senate much harder. Many thought that triangulation was a '90s tactic, not one for the new millennium. 
 
Andrew Cuomo’s choice as lieutenant governor, Pat Duffy (the new Democratic mayor of Rochester), a former policeman and a former Republican, is very popular in his own hometown. Although a longer Democrat than Kathleen Rice, she has found success in Nassau County, traditionally a bastion of Al D’Amato Republicanism. Duffy is pretty new to political life, and that is supposedly a valuable commodity in this election year. 

 
The Attorney General's race is the one to watch
 
There are five candidates running for an office that wasn’t technically vacant until Andrew declared for the governorship. (Liz Holtzman’s candidacy wavered in the interim.)
 
The five candidates are:

State Senator Eric Schneiderman is a progressive voice on many issues. This session, with Eric as chairman, the Codes Committee finally dealt with the draconian Rockefeller drug laws. In office since 1998, he was such a thorn in the side of the Republican majority that they not only redistricted him into a neighborhood he wasn't supposed to win, but they literally denied him pencils and paper for his office. As the only candidate from New York City, he may have an advantage, because NYC provides more than half the vote in any statewide Democratic primary.
 
Richard Brodsky is another assertive liberal. He has gone after the MTA on their budget. He is the author of the broadband extension and Net Neutrality bill in the Assembly. He ran in 2006, but quit the race to donate a kidney to his sick daughter. Brodsky is from Westchester County, which has been trending Democratic until the 2009 local elections, when there were setbacks in suburban races.
 
Sean Coffey is a tall man with an engaging personal story and a charismatic speaking style. He's trial lawyer, with that kind of presence, and seemingly on the good side of litigation. He was the lead attorney (according to his stump speech) in the WorldCom case. He got money back for the shareholders and himself. He will self-fund. He has never held office... but he has expressed himself in a populist manner.

Eric DiNallo has the distinction of having been in Eliot Spitzer's AG office. Di Nallo's claim to fame was that he brought up the Martin Act, a 1921 law that gives the attorney general extraordinary powers to fight financial crimes traditionally regarded as federal matters. Eliot Spitzer used the Martin Act to do what the Bush SEC and DOJ wouldn't do. He's the ex-insurance commissioner of NY.
 
D.A. Kathleen Rice of Nassau County was enthusiastically supported in her 2005 race for against 31-year anti-choice incumbent D.A. Dennis Dillon, and by winning made a lot of friends. She was reelected by a large margin in 2009, a bad year for Democrats on Long Island. Tom Suozzi, Nassau County chair, lost. She sees her D.A. role as a model for her AG. role: a crime fighter. She has a less expansive view of the office than Schneiderman, Di Nallo and Brodsky. Rice is, however, Andrew Cuomo's candidate in the race. It was a whisper campaign that just before the convention became very loud. 

Initially it was planned to have Rice box out every other nominee by getting 51%. But the day before the convention it was decided that the party would place all five candidates on the ballot by the Party, sparing them having to go the expensive petition route. It had begun to look bad that the gubernatorial nominee was trying to control who the Attorney General was going to be. The AG is an office that is supposed to be independent. Even Eliot Spitzer did not intervene in the AG race in 2006.
 
Third-party endorsements in the general election: What will happen to/with the Working Families Party? 
 
NY has third parties, but it also has cross-endorsements. Third parties can endorse the nominee of the larger parties. The crucial number here is 50,000 votes. In order for a party to maintain its ballot line all over the state for the next four years, it has to get 50,000 votes for governor in a gubernatorial year.
 
Theoretically, the Conservative Party could endorse anyone, but they usually endorse the Republican, thereby pulling the Republican Party even further to the right.
 
The Independence Party has a very checkered history, and no ideology to speak of-- at the moment it is the personal province of billionaire Tom Golisano. Andrew Cuomo has already accepted their nomination through their executive committee, even though the party's actions in financial matters are under investigation by the NY County DA, Cy Vance.
 
The Working Families Party (WFP) was founded as a representative of those elements in the Democratic Party that are progressive-- like the unions, from the SEIU to the teachers' union and others.
 
Andrew Cuomo has not yet said he would accept the WFP's endorsemen. He ran on their line in the 2006 election, but this year he is pushing the unions close to the WFP in terms of the budget. While he has not stumped against them-- yet-- he may be using them as a foil. He is expecting other Democrats to fall in line with his agenda, a "do it my way or get out of the way" stance. He has said that there is some concern with the investigation of the WFP by the U.S. Attorney, but of course the Independence Party is also being investigated.
 
Staying in the cocoon of the AG's office allowed Andrew to emerge fully formed. It had the added benefit to him that it did not give any hint to either the press or the party to actually know what his postions are on important matters confronting the party and the state. He was anointed long ago as the electoral savior, but it turns out nobody knew what his plans for governing the state are.
 
If Andrew doesn't take the WFP's endorsement, and they can't find someone with enough name ID to get 50,000 votes, they are dead. Why would the future Democratic governor of NY countenance that? Son of a liberal icon. Some wonder if it's just political pressure, or whether it fits into a longer agenda to go toward the so-called middle of the political spectrum.

There is some speculation that Andrew would agree to take the WFP line if they endorse Rice or at least don't endorse Eric Scneiderman, whom everyone thinks has the inside track. It's a terrible dilemma for the WFP: extinction, or not helping a real friend and supporter win.

Will The Banksters Be Brought To Heel?

Yesterday we mentioned how America's Wall Street aristocracy is doing its Marie Antoinette impersonation in the face of rising unemployment, increased foreclosures and a stagnant economy-- all conditions they were instrumental in bringing about. Tomorrow this decade's version of the Pecora Commission will begin taking testimony from the banksters. In Pecora's day-- a day before the likes of Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers at the apex of the Democratic Party-- they know how to interact with banksters without ingratiating and groveling. I have low expectations. So does everyone else.

Last night the NY Times reported that Obama is looking into levying a special bankster tax to help reduce the federal deficit. Republicans, Blue Dogs and Chuck Schumer might not like it-- and its hard to believe the Three Horsemen of the Wall Street Apocalypse, Emanuel, Geithner and Summers will get behind it-- but it would probably wind up being the most universally popular thing he could do.

The bank fee would recover some of the money that taxpayers put up to bail out the financial system after its near collapse in the fall of 2008, a rescue effort that has contributed to the largest annual budget deficits since World War II.

...With popular anger building as big banks show profits and pay sizable bonuses while unemployment remains high, the Obama administration has come under pressure at home and abroad to support a financial transactions tax on institutions and to heavily tax their executive compensation.
But the United States, led by the Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, has been opposed, arguing that a transactions tax would simply be passed on to customers and a bonus tax could be easily circumvented.

The 27-nation European Union called for a global transactions tax in December and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain had proposed the idea in November at a meeting of the Group of 20 developed and emerging nations, saying revenue could be stockpiled to finance any future bailouts. Separately, Britain and France have proposed a large tax on financial executives’ bonuses.

Emanuel's perspective is that Obama will need all the Wall Street criminals to continue donating to his re-election efforts if he's going to beat back the Republicans in 2012, so you can count on him trying to broker a deal the way he did with Big Pharma. Emanuel is one of them and it's unlikely he's smart enough to take into account just how loathed the banksters are among the "little people" he never interacts with. I hope I'm wrong but I have no faith in any commission created by an overly compromised Congress, a commission that is bipartisan, which only means Republicans and corporate Democrats will make sure the banksters are protected. We'll soon see if Phil Angelides has the strength to make something out of this mess. If he does, he'll be a national hero, but after hearing him and that clown Bill Thomas on NPR the other day, my expectations dropped to almost zero. I'd put a lot more faith into New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to effectively fight back against the banks, even if his motives are self-serving. I wish Eliot Spitzer was in action though.



UPDATE: Do You Ever Get Advice From Your Broker?

If you do, be careful. According to a client e-mail from a senior exec at Goldman Sachs, released by the NY Times this morning, that advice is more likely to benefit the company and satisfy their priorities than to benefit the clients. Goldman Sachs is refusing to explain the e-mail, which warns the client not to consider the advice as objective or even based on independent research.

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