Michael Cohen’s U-haul crash scandal takes him off a cliff

| 8:48 pm EDT May 1, 2018
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When prosecutors are trying to pressure someone into flipping on an ally, it’s not enough to put together the kind of criminal case that the person has no chance of beating at trial. Prosecutors have to put together a case so thoroughly overwhelming, it convinces the person that there’s no use in even trying to beat the rap. The Feds may have just gotten their hands on the kind of scandal that can push Michael Cohen over the edge when it comes to flipping on Donald Trump.

Up to now, most of the publicly known allegations against Michael Cohen have involved orchestrating shady coverups of shady behavior on the part of Trump and his other clients. He’s arranged unethical financial payoffs without necessarily intending to break the law, and he may have crossed the legal line without knowing about it. That gives him the chance, at least in his mind, to go into trial and argue that he isn’t really guilty because he wasn’t trying to break any laws. However, that just changed thanks to a scandal involving, of all things, U-Haul trucks being crashed.

Rolling Stone magazine is now reporting that Michael Cohen’s clients took turns renting U-Haul trucks and purposely crashing them into each other’s cars, in order to set up fraudulent insurance payouts. This is different in that it’s an intentional attempt at definitively violating the law, as opposed to paying off a woman to keep quiet about an affair. If the Feds can get these “clients” to testify that Cohen was in on it, that’ll be the kind of open and shut legal case that could prompt Cohen to realize he’s not getting out of this.

That’s the threshold required to get someone like Michael Cohen to flip on an ally like Donald Trump. We saw it when Michael Flynn didn’t want to flip despite the mounting criminal charges against him, until he and his son were implicated in something as cartoonish as a kidnapping plot. Now Cohen is implicated in staging car crashes – which will help take him over the proverbial cliff.