Donald Trump’s attorneys could now be headed to prison too
Republican political strategist Rick Wilson famously said that everything Donald Trump touches dies. Now we may now need a new corollary: everyone Trump touches goes to prison. We’ve seen nineteen people indicted already in Trump’s Russia scandal. The latest move made today by Special Counsel Robert Mueller means that even Trump’s attorneys may need to worry about ending up in prison.
Mueller announced today that he has indicted, and received a guilty plea, from some guy named Alex van der Zwaan. He has all kinds of connections to Russia in general and to the Trump-Russia scandal in particular, and it’s still not yet clear precisely why Mueller made a point of targeting him. But here’s the important part for now: van der Zwaan is an attorney, and he was charged with misleading investigators about the Trump-Russia scandal and refusing to turn over relevant evidence.
So we’re now at the point where Mueller is even bringing criminal charges against the attorneys in the Trump-Russia scandal, and those charges are valid enough that this attorney decided to immediately plead guilty. This means that every attorney who plays these kinds of games with evidence is going to end up getting busted as well. That brings us to Trump and his attorneys.
Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen has been accused in various media reports of a whole host of crimes related to the Trump-Russia scandal, though he asserts that none of it is true. Will Robert Mueller bring criminal charges against him? What about the attorneys Trump hired specifically to represent him in the Russia scandal? There is no known evidence that lawyers like Ty Cobb and John Dowd have illegally tried to mislead Mueller. But based on his track record, we know with near certainty that Trump has repeatedly pressured them to break the law on his behalf. For their sake, they’d better hope they never did give in to Trump’s demands.
