February 23, 2019

Absolutely fabulous interview on All In With Chris Hayes on Friday night. The guest was Elie Mystal from Above the Law and he had some perfect quotes in this interview regarding Mueller, Trump and the criminal exposure that the whole Trump Crime Family faces, not matter when (or how) Trump leaves office.

HAYES: I'm joined by co editor and chief from Above the Law. What do you make of this? They cooperate. You've got this weird thing that happens where you have these two sentencing memos where the Mueller team says, "Yeah, he's been pretty good," and SDNY says, "He has not helped us at all, and we're pretty furious about that" and now he's back in there on Martin Luther King Day.

MYSTAL: I think what it tells us is SDNY is going to be part of Donald Trump 's life for the rest of his natural life. SDNY is coming at Trump like syphilis. It's gonna make him crazy, and it's never going away. Everybody's so worried about, like "Oh, the Mueller report. Is it going to happen this week? Is it gonna happen next week? When is it going..." SDNY is going to be HERE. It's going to be here NOW. It's going to be here when Trump is out of OFFICE. It's going to be here for his FAMILY, it's going to be here for his GRANDKIDS if he's not careful. So, overall what we see today is SDNY continuing to pull threads on the Trump Organization, which appears to be pretty criminally implicated in the lots of different ways and they continue to pull that thread.

Now, what does that mean for Cohen? There's no upside for Cohen, given that he's already been sentenced. There's no upside for Cohen unless he can actually give them information that leads to prosecution. This is -- he is now in the 1-800-tips line part of his life where unless he gets somebody convicted, he's going to stay in jail for three years. So, the only thing that's worth it for him to say is something that he and SDNY think could lead to prosecution of another individual.

HAYES: So you know I thought about this in light of the insurance part of that reporting, which was interesting and I hadn't thought of it before. But someone on our staff remembered that Donald Trump -- 2016 AP story. He received $17 million insurance payment in 2005 for hurricane damage to Mar-a-Lago. But the Associated Press has found little evidence of such large-scale damage. People get prosecuted for insurance fraud. That's a thing that happens in the world. Interesting that that term jumped out in that article.

MYSTAL: I'm having to to give credit to my wife because she's been saying for three years now if we've seen so much evidence Trump committed some kind of illegality or crime in the run up to the election, if we've seen so much evidence that Trump committed some kind of illegality or crime in terms of obstruction while he was President, what makes us think he hasn't committed many many many crimes over his long and disastrous business career? And so at some point, and I think the SNDY is the right point, SDNY has to start investigating actual crimes that happen at the Trump Organization and you're exactly right to bring up this insurance fraud thing. Because once you're looking at insurance fraud, the SDNY is not limited in scope like the Mueller investigation is, to just looking at collusion between Russia. The SDNY can follow the money. And they seem to be following the money and that should be terrifying for Trump and Jared and Don Jr. and Eric and Ivanka.

HAYES: Michael Cohen implicated the President in the commission of a federal felony to which he has pleaded and sentenced for in federal court in the Southern District with the approval of federal prosecutors who have talked to other people around said crime in which he is Individual One who Michael Cohen said directed the crime. That, in and of itself, is an indictable crime if the man didn't happen to be sitting in the White House.

MYSTAL: And that's why I say he's not going to be sitting there forever. Impeachment is a political issue. But at some point he's no longer going to be a President and SDNY, I believe, is going to be waiting for him.

HAYES: And there's a question of statute of limitations, there, particularly on the campaign finance crimes. It is possible that if -- you said -- the President runs for reelection to essentially stay out of criminal exposure, which is to say, if he's elected, his sort of force field that protects him from being indicted extends for another four years and maybe he can get away with it, which is a pretty perverse situation to find ourselves in.

MYSTAL: Nobody needs to win this election more than Donald Trump.

I have to be honest, it made me giddy to hear that Trump and all his evil spawn should be terrified for YEARS to come about the SDNY coming after them.

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