Mueller’s case against Cohen has little to do with Trump or campaign finance violations

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President Trump and the 2016 campaign amount to a footnote in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's sentence filings on Michael Cohen, despite the news media's heavily overstated narrative that the whole thing is about to blow the lid on a White House "felony."

The documents are almost exclusively an indictment of Cohen as a tax evader and serial liar. The link to Trump, or of any allegation of wrongdoing on his behalf, has nowhere near the clarity liberals want you to believe.

One of Mueller’s filings demonstrates that Cohen repeatedly lied to Congress and to the Justice Department about the timeline of a business deal in Russia that he had pursued on behalf of the Trump Organization.

The other document is much worse for Cohen in detailing his own conduct.

“[T]he crimes committed by Cohen were more serious than his submission allows and were marked by a pattern of deception that permeated his professional life (and was evidently hidden from the friends and family members who wrote on his behalf),” the document reads at the start.

The Mueller document also lays bare Cohen’s defrauding of banks that loaned him money. He failed to disclose to them millions of dollars of his personal debt and expenses.

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Only after those astonishing revelations does the special counsel delve into the 2016 campaign and the payments to two porn actresses who allegedly had separate affairs with Trump. The document says that Cohen “admitted” that he “acted in coordination with and at the direction of [Trump]” and that Cohen “acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

Cohen, with the threat of harsh penalties related to tax evasion and lying to Congress, told prosecutors he committed the campaign finance violations.

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What the Mueller documents make clear is that, in addition to being a tax fraud and liar, Cohen wasn’t much of a fixer. Cohen was able to temporarily quiet affair allegations from two women with more than $200K between them, and yet there's no evidence either of them would have changed the results of the election if they had been made public.

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Maybe Trump did knowingly and deliberately violate campaign finance rules by using money to hush up two porn stars. But the Cohen documents don’t say that. Instead, they say that Cohen was a tax cheat and a liar. Trump and the campaign are an afterthought.

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