Donald Trump goes on Fox News, confesses to felony
Donald Trump just now tweeted that he’ll be interviewed tomorrow morning on Fox News by Ainsley Earhardt. However, he already taped the interview earlier today, and Fox has been teasing it throughout the day. In one clip that’s already circulating online,Trump directly addresses the hush money that Michael Cohen paid to Trump’s mistresses on his behalf during the election. The trouble: in trying to explain why he was innocent, Trump instead directly confessed to a felony.
Trump was referencing the payments involved when he said that they “didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me.” He was trying to make the argument that because official campaign funds weren’t involved, it wasn’t a crime for he and Michael Cohen to have paid off these women. But this merely demonstrates that Trump has no idea how campaign finance law works. It’s the same felony whether the candidate uses campaign funds or personal funds to make the payment.
But whereas Trump might have been able to claim reasonable doubt by arguing that someone in the campaign authorized the payments without his knowledge, that’s now out the window, because Trump just admitted that he made the payments. How blatant of a confession is this? Former Republican Congressman David Jolly summed it up this way: “Trump just confessed that he acted in his *personal capacity* to aid in the commission of the crime to which Michael Cohen confessed to yesterday, and to which a federal judge agreed with prosecutors that the confessed action was in fact a crime by Cohen.”
Yet even after Donald Trump’s confession began to circulate and political analysts and legal experts on all sides agreed that he had indeed confessed to a felony, Trump still went on to plug the interview. He really wants everyone to watch his felony confession on Fox News tomorrow morning. Trump’s criminal defense strategy now appears to consist of screwing up as dramatically as possible.
