Prosecution Filings Spell Trouble for Trump

this morning. That follows a weekend in which Democrats like Congressman Adam Schiff said that Trump could face impeachment and even jail time over his connection to the hush money payments. Coin pleaded to I takeaway is there's a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him. That he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time. Join me. Is Brad Moss a

partner at Mark Zaide. Brad, do you agree with shift? Can the president face indictment when he leaves office? Is he likely to? Yes? I absolutely agree with the Congress And actually, a former prominent federal prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, who has been a critic of the Russia probe, has nonetheless issued an op ed that's in Fox News, agreeing more or lesser shift that the president faces significant legal peril separate from anything that Special Counsel Mueller is doing with

the Russian investigation. He faces possibly his greatest legal peril from this situation with his former attorney Michael Cohen and

the campaign finance violations and fraud. And if he wasn't the president right now, it's a pretty decent bet that at least he would have been issued what's called the target letter by the Justice Department letting him know that he's possibly going to be indicted, if not actually already being indicted by this point, he would have almost certainly faced some type of scrutiny by now because of the standing guidance that the Justice Department operates under that says

a sitting president should not be indicted and cannot be indicted. That's kind of spared him at the moment, but it certainly forces him to face some serious political problems, especially as things developed further, and it could result in the Just Department, the federal prosecutors in New York referring a report to the efting Attorney General. Thing. We think this needs to be referred to Congress for consideration under the impeachment process, which is the design of the Founding Fathers

in terms of removing a president from office. President Richard Nixon was named by the Watergate Grand Jury as an unindicted co conspirator. Can that happen to President Trump? Sure? I mean, and I think actually that's more or less a rather reasonable interpretation of what came out of that sentencing memoranda from the federal prosecutors in the Cohen case. I think it's fair to say that the President is,

in fact, at this point an unindicted co conspirator. The memoranda very clearly lays out that Mr Cohen acted at the direction and coordination with this client, which was Donald J. Trump.

We know that this was done in their Their investigation has involved limited use of nity agreements with people at the Trump organization who cut the checks to reimburse Mr Cohen, as well as an individuals at and that Acquirer who are part of a separate but overlapping criminal conspiracy to do a similar hush payment agreement with a playboy playmate. This is really serious for the president, and this, more

than anything, could damage him politically. This morning, President Trump tweeted and compared the payments by Cohen to President Obama's campaign paying a fine for campaign reporting violations. Is there a danger that this will be dismissed as just a campaign violation? Well, sure, you certainly have seen some of that political spin, and people who ultimately rely on the president for political support are going to go along those lines.

There's going to be an element of tribalism here. Certain people in the president's camp will never desert him on that front. They'll say in the end, this is all just you know, overhyping a campaign finance violation. It's comparing apples to a luck not They're nothing similar and not

even close to the same type of thing. What happened with the Obama people, and it's happened with other campaigns, was a failure to properly report what they're called last minute forty eight hour notice donations, donations that were otherwise legal. Would happen with the Cohen situation, has laid out in the sentencing memoranda, that was a criminal conspiracy to defraud the FEC, defraud the public, and to conceal contributions that

themselves were far in excess of the acceptable limits. So, Brett, what about the statute of limitations if Trump wins another election. Yeah, so if you were to win, he was just if he were to serve out a second full you know, for your term, the special limitations would have run. So

there's two options here. One is that the Justice Department could secure what is, you know, commonly known as a field indictment, so that the Statute of Limitations would be, as the term is called told and so it wouldn't have lapsed by the time he left office. But there's obviously, given the publicity surrounding this case, it's gonna be hard

to keep that all under wraps at this point. So I think if the Just Department truly feels, after they've gotten through all the information they've already been securing from Mr Cohen and the individuals Trump Organization, the National Inquire, if they truly feel that there is a legal case they could otherwise bring against the president, I think they

will draft a report. I think they'll provide it to the Acting Attorney General with a recommendation that he forwarded to Congress for considerations, saying this is outside of our control right now to handle. We cannot simply indicte a sitting president under our guidance, it is a political question for Congress to debate. In another sentencing memo on Friday, which was Sentencing Memo Day, the Mueller team documented the alleged lies that Paul Manafort told after he agreed to

cooperate with them. What did you learn from that filing? Well, more than anything else, it is that despite all the claims of Manafort that they had cut off contact with the White House, we found out that months after he was invited, he was still coordinating and talking with the White House. And this is someone who has been separately indicted not only for all his money fraud and tax fraud issues, but for trying to engage in witness tampering.

And so you have to wonder or those discussions between Paul Manaford's team and White House officials was that additional conspiracy to conceal relevant information that was at a additional conspiracy to obstruct justice. The fact that these people keep doing this really what makes you wonder where the lawyers are to stomp out this amateurism, saying you can't do this. There are certain lines you don't cross. And once he

was invited, no one in the White House. No one in the Trump administration should have taken his call or exchanged any emails with him or anyone on his team. I'm still struggling to understand how Manifoort, who knows that has learned from experience, that Muller knows the answers and is following everything that goes on. Why would he think that he could get away with something like this a lifetime of arrogance and feeling for so many years, for

so many decades, that he was above bala. I mean, remember, think of how many years ago your body laddering at tax fraw case arguably could have been brought against Paul Manaford is skated by on the thin edge of legality for so many years. These guys they get sloppy, they get arrogant, they think they can pull off anything, and you're seeing that with Paul Manaforts, the potential witness tempering, obstruction of justice. They just keep making the same mistakes.

In the end, you know, you think about that, You think about all the President's men. The great line, these weren't really smart guys, and things got out of control. It's the exact same thing here, all right, we all should watch All the President's Men again. Thanks so much, Brad. That's Brad Moss. He's a partner at mark X. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcast, SoundCloud, and

on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brasso. This is Bloomberg