Cohen Lawyer, Lanny Davis, Says They Have the Goods on Collusion

Well, it is shaping up to be one heck of a day in Trumplandia.

To get the full scope of what’s going on and the potential for just how bad it could potentially be for President Trump, we need to recap Tuesday’s tumultuous headlines.

So several things of interest happened, and truly, the news was coming fast and furious. I couldn’t open enough tabs on my computer to cover it all without causing the world to freeze up.

One note of interest was the verdict handed down in the trial of former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

After several days of deliberation, a jury found Manafort guilty of eight felony counts of the eighteen charges against him. The remaining ten were declared mistrials.

While Trump loyalists are celebrating that less than half of the charges resulted in a guilty verdict, they forget that if special counsel Robert Mueller so chooses, he can retry the remaining ten.

In a bit of news that may have got lost in the shuffle (and I’ll be addressing later), Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent who authored the Trump-Russia dossier, had a victory in a United States court on Tuesday.

Steele was sued by three Russian oligarchs named in the dossier for defamation. Judge Anthony C. Epstein upheld a motion by Steele and tossed the case out.

And of course, there was the news about Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney and “fixer” for Donald Trump.

Facing 65 years in prison, Cohen pleaded guilty to wire fraud, bank fraud, tax fraud, and campaign finance law violations.

What’s more, court documents showed that in making his guilty plea, Cohen directly implicated Donald Trump (referred to in the court transcript as “Individual 1”) in directing the payoff of his two mistresses, porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal just before the 2016 election.

This draws a direct line between Donald Trump and the campaign finance law violation – if it can be proved.

And as Trump took his act to a rally crowd in West Virginia on Tuesday night, rambling wildly about how no one could gestate a turkey like his mom (I’m not kidding), and boasting to the poor mining community in attendance of his money and “many much more houses,” Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, was peeling back the layers of the day’s events.

Davis made an appearance on MSNBC on Tuesday night and said that his client, Cohen, has certain information that he felt would be of importance to special counsel Robert Mueller.

Specifically, in regards to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between members of Trump’s campaign team and several Russian officials.

“Mr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows,” Davis told the network.

“Not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

Some may recall that Trump, while on the campaign trail, openly called on the Russians to release his opponent, Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

It was around that time that hacked emails from the DNC were released through WikiLeaks, uncovering a plot by DNC leaders to derail the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, in order to assure Hillary Clinton became their nominee.

It’s no certainty that the reveal of those emails resulted in Hillary’s loss. She was about as awful, inauthentic, and unlikeable as a candidate as the DNC could have cooked up. What the reveal did, however, was anger enough Democrat voters that many, in protest, withheld their vote. Most of the defectors voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

But back to Trump and that Trump Tower meeting…

Last month a source told The Post that Cohen was present when Trump was informed by his son Donald Trump Jr. that Russians offered “dirt” on then-candidate Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s insistence has been that he knew nothing about the meeting, because nobody had told him.

As it turned out, it was Donald Trump the elder who crafted the message on the meeting that Trump the younger delivered to the press, once news of the meeting broke.

The four Russians in the room included a lawyer with Kremlin ties, a businessman who worked for an oligarch and a lobbyist.

The Trump Tower meeting is being considered as evidence of the Trump campaign working along with Russians to defeat Clinton.

Along with Donald Trump Jr., there was Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner (who probably didn’t sleep a wink, last night), and Paul Manafort.

Davis seemed to be making a clear call to special counsel. His client wants a deal, and I suspect for them to be making such an aggressive move against Trump, the man Cohen once said he’d take a bullet for, he’s clearly not expecting a presidential pardon.

Now we wait to see if Mueller takes the bait.