As Mueller's inquiry deepens, is the net closing in on Trump?

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/15/trump-turbulent-week-cohen-crisies

As Mueller's inquiry deepens, is the net closing in on Trump?

Tom McCarthy in New York

Sat 15 Dec 2018 10.00 GMT Last modified on Sat 15 Dec 2018 14.21 GMT

After a week that could tally as one of the most turbulent of his presidency, Donald Trump and his embattled top aides have been hit with strong signs the worst is yet to come, in the form of tersely worded court documents and testimony.

On Wednesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, whose job for 10 years was, in his own words, to cover up Donald Trump’s “dirty deeds”, stood before a US district judge and described how his once-bulletproof faith in Trump had been shattered. "I accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen I truly admired,” Cohen, 52, said of the president. “In fact, I now know that there is little to be admired.”

But a less-noticed scene in court that day points to much bigger trouble ahead for Trump. Also present for the Cohen hearing was a member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, the prosecutor Jeannie Rhee, who described how much help Cohen had been to the investigation into alleged collusion between the campaign and Moscow. “He has provided our office with credible information” about “core Russia issues”, Rhee told the court. “Mr Cohen has sought to tell us the truth, and that is of utmost value to us. There’s only so much that we can say about the particulars at this time.”

The “particulars” that the Mueller team declined to talk about almost certainly pertained to investigations with targets who ranked above Cohen, legal analysts said. Those could be one of relatively few figures at this point, experts agreed: probably one of the president’s children, his son-in-law, or Trump himself.
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The list of legal crises that Trump, his family and associates need to worry about seemed to explode in the last week. Major developments included:
Federal prosecutors investigating Trump’s inaugural committee, a non-profit, for alleged wrongdoing that could include improper foreign contributions, pay-for-play or illegal payments to pop-up firms, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Prosecutors revealing a non-prosecution agreement with the media company AMI, which admitted paying, “in concert with the [Trump] campaign”, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her story of an affair with Trump (which Trump denies).

The significant expansion of Trump’s alleged role in the hush payments scheme, for which Cohen was convicted of multiple felonies, with NBC News placing Trump in a meeting with AMI’s chief, David Pecker, to discuss the payments and his campaign (plus a separate conversation which Cohen recorded).

The spy Maria Butina becoming the first Russian to plead guilty to attempting to tamper in the 2016 election. In her plea, she described how she infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the Republican party to try to cultivate “influential Americans” – unnamed, as yet – and the Trump campaign.

Lawyers for the former adviser Michael Flynn filing a sentencing memo touting his cooperation with Mueller in 19 meetings “totaling approximately 62 hours and 45 minutes”. In a heavily redacted document earlier this month, Mueller described Flynn’s extensive cooperation in as-yet secret investigations.
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