The “rule of law” has been under a full throttle attack-mode  by the republican President Donald Trump and his crony republicans. No institution is perfect but the FBI and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) have taken steps/ reform since the days of J. Edgar Hoover to where it is an entity we can count on.

Just look at what the judicial system and the free press which is what the president hates as he frequently disparages and tweets about both, have accomplished in just one week in April 2018.

1.) The president’s personal attorney/ consigliere  Michael Cohen’s office, house, hotel room was raided by FBI on 9th of April, directed by Southern District of NY, which is headed by a President Trump republican appointee.

See: UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK/ POLITICO 

2.) By the SDNY judicial office in Manhattan taking over this case involving Mr. Cohen, this guarantees that this part of the investigation will continue no matter who President Trump fires now. While the president can pardon anyone convicted of a federal crime, he can’t if Mr. Cohen is criminally charged at the NY state level in the state courts. The benefit of this case being investigated by the federal court system in the Southern District of NY,  is that this state is where Mr. Cohen conducts a lot of his business. This means that the federal courts can work with the state courts of New York so that Mr. Cohen will/ can be charged for criminal wrong doings that would come under the jurisdiction of the State of NY where the promise of a presidential pardon carries no weight.

3.) News has surfaced to indicate that Mr. Cohen is running a NDA (non disclosure agreement) mill business like the old fashioned ambulance chaser. He has been involved with NDA cases with Elliott Broidy, a republican major fund raiser; Dino Sujadin, a former doorman who had compromising information about the president; Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal who both claim an affair with the president in 2006.. All except Dino was represented by the same attorney Keith M. Davidson. The last three individuals involved payments for their silence made after President Trump had started his presidential campaign, where the monies paid and the circumstances are subject to campaign finance laws.

4.) McClatchy report has broken the news that Mr. Cohen was definitely in Prague around Sep 2016, which Mr. Cohen has vehemently denied in the public forum but also under oath when he was interviewed by Senate and the House Intel Committees.

5.) By the president refusing to be interviewed by the FBI, Mr. Mueller is in position to finish up his report on the “obstruction of justice” portion of his investigation pertaining to the president. I am certain that he is working overtime to finish the report on his findings asap.

The “rule of law” will prevail and the end is in sight.

See: SNL cold open: Robert De Niro’s Mueller grills Ben Stiller’s Cohen/ Washington Post

Here’s the rest of the story…

On April 14, 2018 Adam Davidson of the New Yorker penned the following report, “Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency”

Excerpts:

“In Iraq and with the financial crisis, it was helpful, as a reporter, to be able to divide the world into those who actually understand what was happening and those who said hopeful nonsense. The path of both crises turned out to be far worse than I had imagined.”

“I thought of those earlier experiences this week as I began to feel a familiar clarity about what will unfold next in the Trump Presidency. There are lots of details and surprises to come, but the endgame of this Presidency seems as clear now as those of Iraq and the financial crisis did months before they unfolded. Last week, federal investigators raided the offices of Michael Cohen, the man who has been closer than anybody to Trump’s most problematic business and personal relationships. This week, we learned that Cohen has been under criminal investigation for months—his e-mails have been read, presumably his phones have been tapped, and his meetings have been monitored. Trump has long declared a red line: Robert Mueller must not investigate his businesses, and must only look at any possible collusion with Russia. That red line is now crossed and, for Trump, in the most troubling of ways. Even if he were to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and then had Mueller and his investigation put on ice, and even if—as is disturbingly possible—Congress did nothing, the Cohen prosecution would continue. Even if Trump pardons Cohen, the information the Feds have on him can become the basis for charges against others in the Trump Organization. (Because Michael Cohen resides in New York City where he conducts a lot of his businesses, some charges can be prosecuted by the New York state courts where the presidential pardon has no reach.)”

“This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.”

“However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.”

“Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities. It has become commonplace to say that enough was known about Trump’s shady business before he was elected; his followers voted for him precisely because they liked that he was someone willing to do whatever it takes to succeed, and they also believe that all rich business people have to do shady things from time to time. In this way of thinking, any new information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate Trump already think he’s a crook; those who love him don’t care.”

“I believe this assessment is wrong. Sure, many people have a vague sense of Trump’s shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested, a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace. Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007, about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture.”

“The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.”

“Cohen, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka monetized their willingness to sign contracts with people rejected by all sensible partners. Even in this, the Trump Organization left money on the table, taking a million dollars here, five million there, even though the service they provided—giving branding legitimacy to blatantly sketchy projects—was worth far more. It was not a company that built value over decades, accumulating assets and leveraging wealth. It burned through whatever good will and brand value it established as quickly as possible, then moved on.”

“There are important legal questions that remain. How much did Donald Trump and his children know about the criminality of their partners? How explicit were they in agreeing to put a shiny gold brand on top of corrupt deals? The answers to these questions will play a role in determining whether they go to jail and, if so, for how long.”

“There is no longer one major investigation into Donald Trump, focussed solely on collusion with Russia. There are now at least two, including a thorough review of Cohen’s correspondence. The information in his office and hotel room will likely make clear precisely how much the Trump family knew. What we already know is disturbing, and it is hard to imagine that the information prosecutors will soon learn will do anything but worsen the picture.”

“Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.”