The problem with Trump-related scandals is they have a definite half-life. Remember Stormy Daniels? She’s the adult film actress whom Donald Trump allegedly slept with (after waxing rhapsodic on the incontrovertible perfidy of sharks, natch) and then paid $130,000 in hush money to. Hush money he lied about, of course.
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If Joe Biden had done any of that, the new GOP House would have already earmarked billions in Medicaid funds to replace the Washington Monument with a giant pewter statue of Daniels high-fiving Ashli Babbitt. Unfortunately, we tend to forget about Stormy and her gross Alice in Wonderland mushroom trip because that was, like, 80 eye-gougingly gruesome Trump scandals ago. But Stormy—and specifically the hush money payments Trump (aka individual-1) sent her through his erstwhile fixer Michael Cohen—appears to be once again on the horizon.
On Tuesday, Cohen met with investigators from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is apparently still on the case.
"They're calling me in for the 14th time, so we'll see what happens," Cohen said, after noting that he’d been asked to appear by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and noting that he hasn't met with the office since Bragg took over last January.
The timing could be a coincidence, but Cohen’s appearance does come just days after the Trump Organization—Donald Trump’s literal criminal enterprise—was sentenced to pay a $1.6 million fine after being found guilty of 17 felony counts related to a years-long tax fraud scheme. That case was also brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors are conducting a wide-ranging investigation and in recent months their focus has returned to the company’s involvement in hush-money payments made to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels from going public with an affair with Trump just before the 2016 election, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has denied the affair.
Prosecutors are also looking into potential insurance fraud after new material came to light from the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into the accuracy of the Trump Organization’s financial statements, the people said.
So will the serial iniquities of Donald John Trump ever be fully redressed?
It sure looks like Bragg and his team are setting their sights on individual-1. After all, Cohen already served time for his part in the hush money scheme. And he wasn’t even able to cross “get spanked with a Forbes magazine featuring Trump’s face on the cover” off his bucket list. So it would be kind of weird if the Manhattan district attorney weren’t going after Trump for the payments.
In the fall, investigators began reexamining some of the investigation's earliest threads, including the alleged payments to Daniels, according to another source.
Bragg has said repeatedly that the investigation remained active. Duncan Levin, an attorney for Jennifer Weisselberg, the former CFO's ex-daughter-in-law who turned over boxes of evidence in 2021, said Bragg's office never appeared to be backing away.
"The fact is that the communications to us from the D.A.'s office have consistently been that the investigation is ongoing. So it doesn't come as much of a surprise to us that the D.A.'s office is actively doing witness interviews," Levin said.
Oh, what fun!
Of course, while we’ve been waiting for years to see Trump defenestrated for this quintessentially American scandal (it’s so simple, even a MAGA zealot could understand it), it represents just a small portion of the legal gantlet Trump must face between now and leaving a severed horse head on Ron DeSantis’ MyPillow.
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Here’s just a small sampling:
Down in Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is still looking into Trump’s attempted fuckery of that state’s 2020 presidential election. Special Counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s handling (read: stealing) of classified documents, as well as his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Writer E. Jean Carroll is still suing Trump for defamation in connection with an incident in which he allegedly raped her. And New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump and his company for $250 million over allegations that he continually inflated the worth of his properties in order to secure bank loans—while undervaluing them for the tax benefits.
The wheels of justice move slowly, and Trump tries to slash their tires every chance he gets. But we can be somewhat comforted that due diligence is, in fact, being done. Because four more years of this guy would be the end of the world as we know it.
And I, for one, would not feel fine.
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