Pay-to-Play

     Important questions are raised by Heather Digby Parton at Salon.com include the following: “The question is, who else was paying and for what? And where is all that money?”

     We now know there was also the Ukraine. Michael Cohen accepted $400,000 from “intermediaries acting for Ukraine's leader, Petro Poroshenko.” The Ukrainian President wanted a face-to-face meeting with Trump. He got it. Shortly thereafter, the Ukraine stopped its investigation into Paul Manafort. From CNBC:

AT&T is in the midst of pursuing an $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. The U.S. Justice Department has sued to block that deal.

In a report on Cohen's company, Avenatti's law firm said that Novartis in late 2017 and early 2018 made four separate payments to Essential Consultants totaling nearly $400,000.

"Following these payments, reports surfaced that Mr. Trump took a dinner with the incoming CEO of Novartis before Mr. Trump's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in late January 2018," Avenatti's report said.

That CEO, Vas Narasimhan, was joined with a group of other companies' executives at that dinner.

      Even if Trump didn’t initially know about the payments to Cohen if he found about them later and attempted to cover it up we’re back to obstruction of justice and misprision of felony. We'll get to misprision a felony later.