Charles P. Pierce: The Michael Cohen Bust Has Changed the Whole Game

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20141563/michael-cohen-trump-white-house-backstabbing/

The Michael Cohen Bust Has Changed the Whole Game
The backstabbing inside Trump's White House is getting ferocious.
By Charles P. Pierce
May 4, 2018

snip//

Cohen’s bust changed the whole game. All of a sudden, all kinds of leaks corresponding to god knows how many different agendas sprang up. A lot of anonymous administration sources clearly are running for the lifeboats, pitching out gleaming nuggets to the ravening hordes as the price of their passage back to what passes for respectability in Republican circles these days. The news is a deafening cacophony of pure white noise and panicky self-preservation. No wonder NBC got its wires crossed. And if this is what's leaking out, imagine what isn't. It must be a cannibal feast of reputations. The White House is now the Babel of backstabbing.

Anyway, my impression is that, at least in the minds of Robert Mueller and his crew, Cohen long ago ceased being an attorney and became a bagman. My impression also is that Mueller and his crew have managed to convince at least one judge that they may be correct in that evaluation. Giuliani implicitly confirmed at least some of this on Wednesday night.

What this also indicates to me is that, if Cohen flips, that’s the ballgame. He knows everything and he’s deeply involved in most of it—all the fundamental New York corruption within which the president* made his fame and fortune, and how he has managed to transfer that essential milieu into a political career in which the basic modus operandi never changed. This is the mechanism of simple municipal corruption brought to the highest levels of government—like old Spiro Agnew, still taking bribes from Maryland grifters while he was vice president. Except on a grand, world-historical scale.

more...

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20141563/michael-cohen-trump-white-house-backstabbing/

[Faux pas]

1. Kickin'

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. bus tossing...a new Olympic event.

and not all hard to watch.

[True Blue American]

3. Looks like Curling

To me. You know where the brooms keep cleaning up debris?

[Scurrilous]

4. They're Spiro-ing out of control.

[babylonsister]

9. Ha! Seems to be, on many fronts! nt

[BobTheSubgenius]

5. I find myself wanting to close my eyes and click my ruby red slippers together.

"It won't be long now. It won't be long now."

[matt819]

6. Hold on just a sec. . .

Rudy the Good has said that Cohen really wasn't doing any legal work for Trump. Would the former mayor of NYC lie?

And I thought that trump kind of referred to Cohen as the covfefe guy, not an integral member of his team. He wouldn't throw an important kind of guy under a bus, would he?

These are shocking revelations.

[mcar]

7. K&R

[Hassler]

8. Ah, nostalgia: Spiro the Zero seems normal compared to these gangsters.