On today’s BradCast, the fallout, both political and legal, continues today after the extraordinary news events of the past 24 hours, when Donald Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort was found guilty of eight federal felonies and the President’s longtime personal attorney and ‘fixer’, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to another eight, including two that implicate Trump in a serious criminal campaign finance violation conspiracy related to hush-money payoffs made to two women just before the 2016 election. [Audio link to show follows below.]
But all of that wasn’t the only bad news for Trump and Republicans yesterday. Late on Tuesday, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and his wife were indicted on 60(!) astonishing counts of fraud, conspiracy and campaign finance violations. Hunter was the second member of Congress to support Trump’s 2016 run for President, after Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), the first in the U.S. House to endorse him, was federally charged earlier this month with insider trading. Hunter’s indictment may not be all that surprising if one is familiar with his (and his father’s) track record of lying to the public. His previously-believed-to-be “safe” Republican House seat in his San Diego Congressional District may now be in peril.
All-in-all, it’s starting to feel a whole lot like 2006, when a similar avalanche of failures and corruption by a GOP Administration and a scandal-ridden Republican House resulted in a “blue wave” election in November.
We’re joined again today by Salon and Hullabaloo’s award-winning opinion journalist HEATHER DIGBY PARTON, as we try to make sense of what feels, in her words, like “the weirdly unfamiliar impression that something real and recognizable had happened”.
We discuss the fallout from the Manafort and Cohen guilty verdicts and pleas, including the new subpoena Cohen received today from the state of New York in the case against Trump’s phony charitable foundation, and the remarkable statement from Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis last night, that his client “has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel,” regarding Team Trump’s infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians and the “computer crime of hacking” that year. Davis now says Cohen is “more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.”
“Digby” shares her thoughts on what surprised her from the Cohen plea deal, what all of this may mean for the President, the GOP and Democrats just over two months out from the crucial 2018 midterms and for Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Also today, a rare, if very dangerous, Category 5/4 Hurricane Lane bears down on Hawaii and we cover noteworthy results from Tuesday’s primary elections in very Republican Wyoming and occasionally-independent Alaska, where a three-way race for Governor could result in a Republican win this November…
Today’s front page of the LA Times was one of the best evah.
http://en.kiosko.net/us/np/latimes.html