Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:45 PM, for 13h 35m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s University Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.
On this day in 1861, future Gov. Lucius Fairchild departs for the front:
The Daily Milwaukee Press reported on this day that Company K of the 1st Wisconsin Infantry presented their Captain, Lucius Fairchild, with a ceremonial sword and sash at Camp Scott in Milwaukee. Fairchild was to leave that same afternoon for Washington, D.C., and begin his new appointment as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry.
Recommended for reading in full —
Matthew DeFour reports Scott Walker’s flights in years after presidential run cost state taxpayers $818,00:The flights included eight trips of less than 40 miles, including from Appleton to Green Bay, though that was part of a busy day on Sept. 7, 2016, in which Walker attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Neenah before promoting his sales tax holiday proposal in Green Bay and Menomonee Falls. The four flights he took that day each covered less than 75 miles and cost a total of $1,667.51.
In nine cases, he flew out of Madison round trip, covering distances of less than 75 miles, with each trip costing on average $819. The destinations included Burlington, West Bend and Oshkosh.
(It would take a vast number of daily brown bags, and a vast number of daily ham sandwiches, to make up this amount. Even Methuselah, one reads, didn’t live so long.)
Mikhaila R. Fogel, Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes consider What Michael Cohen’s Plea and Paul Manafort’s Conviction Mean for Trump and the Mueller Investigation:Philip Bump ponders How the campaign finance charges against Michael Cohen implicate Trump:How big a deal is the Cohen plea agreement?
Very big.
The president’s former lawyer has not only confessed to criminal campaign finance violations, but he has also said under oath that he was doing so at the direction of the president himself. It’s hard to say yet what precisely this means. But it is not a small thing. Setting aside the question of whether Cohen will cooperate with Mueller, it remains to be seen whether prosecutors will pursue additional criminal charges against individuals mentioned but not charged in the criminal information.
Cohen’s plea agreement does not contemplate any specific cooperation. However, as Lawfare’s David Kris noted, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure allow the court to reduce a sentence within one year of sentencing when the government agrees that the defendant has “provided substantial assistance in investigating or prosecuting another person.” That means the question of cooperation, on campaign finance questions or other matters, could remain open possibly even after Cohen’s sentencing. It seems preponderantly likely that Cohen is cooperating—or at least that he will cooperate.
This means that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have a witness on their hands who was very close to Trump and knows a great deal about a lot of things—some of which he pleaded guilty to Tuesday.
Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke, and Norman L. Eisen explain What the Manafort Verdict Means (“It’s Robert Mueller’s biggest victory yet, in one of the most successful special counsel investigations in history”):To the layperson, this likely sounds as a slightly more noxious example of business as usual in politics. It’s not. Cohen made that very clear when he stood up to accept guilt for his actions, in two phrases.
The payment to McDougal was made “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” he said, adding that it was made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” The Daniels payment was similarly made “in coordination with and at the direction of the same candidate” and for the same reason.
Those points are important. As we noted when the Daniels payment was first reported, making a payment of $130,000 to bury a story is of dubious legality in the abstract. How and if it violates the law depends on the relationship of the person making the payment to the campaign and whether such payments were in the standard course of practice of his business.
About those white stripes on chicken…With Tuesday’s convictions in the criminal trial of President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has struck another blow in his investigation: five guilty pleas, 32 indicted individuals, 187 charges revealing startling evidence of Russia’s 2016 attack on our democracy, and now the conviction of one of the top operators in the Trump campaign orbit. Mr. Manafort’s conviction on eight separate counts means he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
The conviction conclusively and publicly demonstrates what many of us have said since the start of the investigation: This is no “witch hunt.” It instead is one of the most successful special counsel investigations in history. Coming alongside the guilty plea by Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, implicating the president in campaign finance violations, it was a very bad day for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Manafort’s conviction cannot be diminished by arguing, as Mr. Trump and his coterie are fond of doing, that the misconduct was unrelated to the Trump campaign or Russian “collusion.” On the contrary, the trial evidence included Mr. Manafort’s close ties to pro-Russia forces and his desperate financial straits as he “volunteered” his time for the next president. The trial revealed how willing Mr. Manafort was to corruptly leverage his position of influence over Mr. Trump during the campaign for his own personal benefit. He offered briefings to a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch and dangled a position in the Trump administration in front of a banker who provided him a loan for which he would not otherwise have qualified.
Have you ever noticed the mysterious white stripes on chicken? pic.twitter.com/c23GeoU0g1
— Business Insider (@businessinsider) August 19, 2018