Trump says the only crime he committed was to beat 'Crooked Hillary' in 2016 as he claims all payments to Stormy Daniels were legal because they didn't come from his campaign as crooked former lawyer alleges, but 'from me'

By Chris Pleasance 

President Trump appeared in peril as Paul Manafort was found guilty and Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to charges leveled as part of Robert Mueller's election meddling probe.

So what comes next for Donald Trump himself?

Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, insists Trump is implicated in a crime because he ordered Cohen to make hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal before the 2016 election.

Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russian election meddling probe as a 'rigged witch hunt', but on Tuesday it delivered two guilty parties

But the prevailing legal opinion is that Trump will not face criminal prosecution while in office, though there is nothing in the Constitution that strictly forbids it.

The text of Article 2, Section 4, and Article 1, Second 3, when taken together  imply that a president must be impeached and convicted by the Senate before he can be prosecuted, but does not outright say it.

Article 2, Section 4, makes clear what the impeachment power is.  

'The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,' it says. 

Article 1, Second 3, sets out the existence of the Senate and says: The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. 

'When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

'Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.' 

That has led to legal debate in the past and the question even ended up before the Supreme Court in 1974 during the Watergate scandal, but a ruling was never made.

Justice Department guidelines say that a sitting President shouldn't be charged with a crime while in office, but that could be subject to a challenge.

Even if Trump cannot be indicted on criminal charges, he could still be impeached for 'treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors'.

Lanny David (left), the attorney for Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen (right), argues that Trump is implicated in the crime - but it is unlikely a sitting president would be indicted on criminal charges

Impeachment requires a majority in the House to pass articles of impeachment against the president. 

The House Judiciary Committee then prosecutes the president in front of the Senate, with the Chief Justice presiding. 

There needs to be a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to convict.

As things stand the Republicans control both houses, so it is highly unlikely that Trump will face impeachment so long as the status quo holds.

However, the Democrats are hoping that mid-term elections in November will hand control of both houses back to them, which would put Trump in trouble.

As one Republican lawyer told Politico, Cohen's allegations that Trump forced him to make payments provides the perfect fodder for impeachment.

'It's the only excuse they'll need. And believe me, they won't need much of an excuse,' he said.

On Tuesday, Trump urged people to vote Republican in the elections, warning that voting Democrat would lead to 'open borders and crime'.

Trump could be impeached, though that is unlikely to happen unless the November mid-terms hand control of the House and Senate back to the Democrats

GUILTY: MICHAEL FLYNN 

Pleaded guilty to making false statements in December 2017. Awaiting sentence

Flynn was President Trump's former National Security Advisor and Robert Mueller's most senior scalp to date. He previously served when he was a three star general as President Obama's director of the Defense Intelligence Agency but was fired. 

He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about his conversations with a Russian ambassador in December 2016. He has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation.

GUILTY AND JAILED: MICHAEL COHEN

Pleaded guilty to eight counts including fraud and two campaign finance violations in August 2018. Pleaded guilty to further count of lying to Congress in November 2018. Sentenced to three years in prison and $2 million in fines and forfeitures in December 2018

Cohen was investigated by Mueller but the case was handed off to the Southern District of New York,leaving Manhattan's ferocious and fiercely independent federal prosecutors to run his case. 

Cohen was Trump's longtime personal attorney, starting working for him and the Trump Organization in 2007. He is the longest-serving member of Trump's inner circle to be implicated by Mueller. Cohen professed unswerving devotion to Trump - and organized payments to silence two women who alleged they had sex with the-then candidate: porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. He admitted that payments to both women were felony campaign finance violations - and admitted that he acted at the 'direction' of 'Candidate-1': Donald Trump. 

He also admitted tax fraud by lying about his income from loans he made, money from  taxi medallions he owned, and other sources of income, at a cost to the Treasury of $1.3 million.

And he admitted lying to Congress in a rare use of the offense. The judge in his case let him report for prison on March 6 and  recommended he serve it in a medium-security facility close to New York City.

GUILTY AND JAILED: PAUL MANAFORT

Found guilty of eight charges of bank and tax fraud in August 2018. Sentenced to 47 months in March 2019. Pleaded guilty to two further charges - witness tampering and conspiracy against the United States. Jailed for total of seven and a half years in two separate sentences. Additionally indicted for mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney, using evidence previously presented by Mueller 

Manafort worked for Trump's campaign from March 2016 and chaired it from June to August 2016, overseeing Trump being adopted as Republican candidate at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He is the most senior campaign official to be implicated by Mueller. Manafort was one of Washington D.C.'s longest-term and most influential lobbyists but in 2015, his money dried up and the next year he turned to Trump for help, offering to be his campaign chairman for free - in the hope of making more money afterwards. But Mueller unwound his previous finances and discovered years of tax and bank fraud as he coined in cash from pro-Russia political parties and oligarchs in Ukraine.

Manafort pleaded not guilty to 18 charges of tax and bank fraud but was convicted of eight counts in August 2018. The jury was deadlocked on the other 10 charges. A second trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent due in September did not happen when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and witness tampering in a plea bargain. He was supposed to co-operate with Mueller but failed to. 

Minutes after his second sentencing hearing in March 2019, he was indicted on 16 counts of fraud and conspiracy by the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., using evidence which included documents previously presented at his first federal trial. The president has no pardon power over charges by district and state attorneys.

GUILTY AND GOING TO WEEKEND JAIL: RICK GATES 

Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements in February 2018. Sentenced to 45 days weekend jail and three years probation, December 17, 2018

Gates was Manafort's former deputy at political consulting firm DMP International. He admitted to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government on financial activity, and to lying to investigators about a meeting Manafort had with a member of congress in 2013. As a result of his guilty plea and promise of cooperation, prosecutors vacated charges against Gates on bank fraud, bank fraud conspiracy, failure to disclose foreign bank accounts, filing false tax returns, helping prepare false tax filings, and falsely amending tax returns.

GUILTY AND JAILED: GEORGE PAPADOPOLOUS

Pleaded guilty to making false statements in October 2017. Sentenced to 14 days in September 2018, and reported to prison in November. Served 12 days and released on December 7, 2018

 Papadopoulos was a member of Donald Trump's campaign foreign policy advisory committee. He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about his contacts with London professor Josef Mifsud and Ivan Timofeev, the director of a Russian government-funded think tank.  

GUILTY AND JAILED: RICHARD PINEDO

Pleaded guilty to identity fraud in February 2018. Sentenced to a year in prison

Pinedo is a 28-year-old computer specialist from Santa Paula, California. He admitted to selling bank account numbers to Russian nationals over the internet that he had obtained using stolen identities.  

GUILTY AND JAILED: ALEX VAN DER ZWAAN

Pleaded guilty to making false statements in February 2018. He served a 30-day prison sentence and was deported to the Netherlands on his release

Van der Zwaan was a Dutch attorney for Skadden Arps who worked on a Ukrainian political analysis report for Paul Manafort in 2012. 

He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about when he last spoke with Rick Gates and Konstantin Kilimnik. His law firm say he was fired.

GUILTY:  W. SAMUEL PATTEN

Pleaded guilty in August 2018 to failing to register as a lobbyist while doing work for a Ukrainian political party. Sentenced to three years probation April 2019

Patten, a long-time D.C. lobbyist was a business partner of Paul Manafort. He pleaded guilty to admitting to arranging an illegal $50,000 donation to Trump's inauguration.

He arranged for an American 'straw donor' to pay $50,000 to the inaugural committee, knowing that it was actually for a Ukrainian businessman.

Neither the American or the Ukrainian have been named.   

CHARGED: KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK

Indicted for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. At large, probably in Russia

Kilimnik is a former employee of Manafort's political consulting firm and helped him with lobbying work in Ukraine. He is accused of witness tampering, after he allegedly contacted individuals who had worked with Manafort to remind them that Manafort only performed lobbying work for them outside of the U.S.

He has been linked to  Russian intelligence and is currently thought to be in Russia - effectively beyond the reach of extradition by Mueller's team.

INDICTED: THE RUSSIANS 

Twenty-five Russian nationals and three Russian entities have been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the United States. They remain at large in Russia

Two of these Russian nationals were also indicted for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 11 were indicted for conspiracy to launder money. Fifteen of them were also indicted for identity fraud. 

Vladimir Putin has ridiculed the charges. Russia effectively bars extradition of its nationals. The only prospect Mueller has of bringing any in front of a U.S. jury is if Interpol has their names on an international stop list - which is not made public - and they set foot in a territory which extradites to the U.S. 

INDICTED: MICHAEL FLYNN'S BUSINESS PARTNERS

Bijan Kian (left), number two in now disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn's lobbying company, and the two's business partner Ekim Alptekin (right) were indicted for conspiracy to lobby illegally.

 Kian, an Iranian-American was arrested and appeared in court charged with a conspiracy to illegally lobby the U.S government without registering as a foreign agent. Their co-conspirator was Flynn, who is called 'Person A' in the indictment and is not charged, offering some insight into what charges he escaped with his plea deal.

Kian, vice-president of Flynn's former lobbying firm, is alleged to have plotted with Alptekin to try to change U.S. policy on an exiled Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania and who is accused by Turkey's strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of trying to depose him.

Erdogan's government wanted him extradited from the U.S. and paid Flynn's firm through Alptekin for lobbying, including an op-ed in The Hill calling for Gulen to be ejected. Flynn and Kian both lied that the op-ed was not paid for by the Turkish government. 

The indictment is a sign of how Mueller is taking an interest in more than just Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

GUILTY AND AWAITING SENTENCE: ROGER STONE 

Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign official and longtime informal advisor to Trump, was indited on seven counts including obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks in January 2019. Convicted on all counts November 15, 2019, awaiting sentence

Stone was a person of interest to Mueller's investigators long before his January indictment, thanks in part due to his public pronouncements as well as internal emails about his contacts with WikiLeks.

In campaign texts and emails, many of which had already been publicly revealed before showing up in Mueller's indictment, Stone communicated with associates about WikiLeaks following reports the organization had obtained a cache of Clinton-related emails.

Stone, a former Nixon campaign adviser who has the disgraced former president's face permanently tattooed on his back, has long been portrayed as a central figure in the election interference scandal.

'They got nothing,' he said of the special counsel's investigation. 

Stone gave 'false and misleading' testimony about his requests for information from WikiLeaks. He then pressured a witness, comedian Randy Credico, to take the Fifth Amendment rather than testify, and pressured him in a series of emails. Following a prolonged dispute over testimony, he called him a 'rat' and threatened to 'take that dog away from you', in reference to Credico's pet, Bianca. Stone warned him: 'Let's get it on. Prepare to die.'  

CLEARED: GREG CRAIG

 

Greg Craig, President Barack Obama's White House counsel, was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent.  Mueller's investigators uncovered Craig's work on behalf the government of Ukraine while probing Manafort, who did business with Craig.

Prosecutors released a grand jury indictment of Craig in April 2019, after Craig's law firm of  Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP agreed to pay more than $4.6 million as part of a settlement. The prominent firm also acknowledged it had failed to register, and placed much of the blame on Craig, a senior partner there.

Craig's lawyer blasted the decision as an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, and prepared to argue that omission of information during an interview is not tantamount to making false statements.

The charges stem from a 2012 report Craig and the firm produced on behalf of the Ukrainian government on opposition figure and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She was an opponent of Manafort's client , former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Craig was cleared on September 9 2019. 

In the span of just two years, Paul Manafort has gone from one of Washington's most sought-after Republican lobbyists to a political pariah with a shattered family.

'My life - personally and professionally - is in shambles,' he told Judge T.S. Ellis III, in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on March 7.

'The last two years have been the most difficult years for my family. Humiliated and would be a gross understatement.' 

He laid it on thicker to the next sentencing judge, Amy Berman Jackson, in Washington D.C. on March 13: 'I will be 70 years old in a few weeks. My wife is 66. She needs me. I need her. Please let me and my wife be together.'

Self-pitying certainly, but hardly wrong. Sitting in a wheelchair and contemplating the real prospect of dying behind bars, Manafort was diminished in every way,  the extravagantly-tailored and immaculately connected powerbroker who could ask for millions for his counsel now wearing prison green as he asked not for money but compassion. 

Typically though, the whole story was not on display; in recent years, Manafort had betrayed his wife with a mistress 30 years his junior who he put up in a New York apartment and handed an unlimited credit card.

That infidelity was only another staging post on the long and spectacular fall from grace for the 69-year-old former Trump campaign manager, the son of a small-town mayor who went on to work for four U.S. presidents and made his fortune as the Washington mouthpiece for some of the world's most notorious dictators.

Today Manafort has few defenders in the nation's capital, after being convicted of tax fraud and money laundering by special counsel Robert Mueller - who first secured a guilty verdict from a jury then a plea deal on the eve of a second trial.

Even Manafort's former boss, President Trump, claimed he never would have hired the former lobbyist if he had known about the allegations.

'Paul Manafort came into the campaign very late and was with us for a short period of time (he represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole & many others over the years), but we should have been told that Comey and the boys were doing a number on him, and he wouldn't have been hired!' wrote Trump in a Twitter post in June 2018.

The president had faced Manafort co-operating with Robert Mueller 'fully and truthfully.'

But even that was beyond the ability of Manafort, who Mueller's prosecutors charge lied to them after his agreement to cooperate.

The power brokers: Paul Manafort, his future business partners Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, were photographed as young Republican operatives. Stone, a Trump confidante and notorious political dirty trickster is now fighting off the Mueller probe himself; Atwater died in 1991, a former RNC chairman with a reputation for dirty campaigns. All three cashed in on their political work by lobbying those they got elected

Manafort, the grandson of an Italian immigrant, was raised in a staunch Republican home in New Britain, Connecticut. 

When he was 16, his father Paul John Manafort Sr. was elected mayor of New Britain and served for three terms. 

In 1981, Manafort Sr. was indicted – but later acquitted – on perjury charges in a sweeping city corruption and bribery scandal that also ensnared the police and fire chiefs.

After Catholic parochial schools and graduating from Georgetown University Law School, Manafort went on to work as an advisor for Republican Presidents Gerald Ford. It is unclear why he was not drafted for Vietnam.

He went on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole's presidential campaign.

But he worked out how to turn political advising into a gusher of cash: by lobbying the very politicians they had helped elect.

He co-founded a prominent lobbying firm with ex-Nixon aide Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater, another notorious figure, which shopped their access to top Republicans to U.S. businesses, state and city governments, and anyone who would pay.

The lobbying would be punctuated by periods of working for campaigns - guaranteeing the access on which they depended if their candidates won (which by and large they did). 

That came to embrace the wider world too; the Manafort lobbying roster included brutal regimes willing to pay high fees for his services – including Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire military leader Mobutu Sese Seko.

Betrayed: Kathleen Manafort stood by her husband despite his family finding proof of his mistress on Instagram; she attended every minute of his trial and was there when he said he was flipping

Manafort went on to found his own political consulting firm in 2005, bringing on his former intern Rick Gates as his trusted deputy.

He also continued to take on controversial clients. In 2010, Manafort helped elect Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, head of Ukraine's Putin-allied Party of Regions.

The victory paid off – between 2010 and 2014, federal investigators said Manafort's firm earned 'a cash spigot': $60 million in fees from the Party of Regions' political patrons.

According to prosecutors, Manafort stashed the funds away in a series of offshore bank accounts and shell companies, and failed to disclose the income in his tax returns. In total, they claim he dodged taxes on $15 million.

But after Yanukovych was voted out of power by Ukraine's parliament in 2014, Manafort's fortunes suddenly changed. He stopped getting payments from Yanukovych's wealthy oligarch supporters, and started to have trouble paying his bills.

This is when prosecutors claim Manafort started applying for loans using phony financial information. In total, they said he scammed banks out of $20 million.

Manafort's then-alleged crimes were uncovered during the course of a special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller, who has been investigating potential Russian interference in the 2016 election and collusion with the Trump campaign.

 Even before the charges were filed against him, Manafort's personal life had been unravelling, according to years of hacked text messages between his daughters Andrea, 32, and Jessica, 36, that were posted online.

According to the messages, Manafort's family had caught him having an affair with a woman who was around the same age as his daughters, renting a pricey house for her in the Hamptons and paying her credit card bill.

They discovered the affair after seeing the woman's posts boasting about her expensive travel and dinners on Instagram. 

Manafort, who was undergoing an emotional breakdown according to the messages, committed himself to a psychiatric clinic in Arizona in 2015. 

Texts: Manafort's daughters Jessica (left, with now ex-husband Jeff Yohai, who flipped) and Andrea (right with husband Christopher Shand) exchanged text messages which were hacked revealing his affairs and calling him a psychopath. Jessica has changed her name to Bond, her mother's maiden name

Fruits of lobbying: This is the condo overlooking the Potomac where the FBI raided Manafort on orders from Mueller. He bought it for $2.75 million, part of a property empire worth conservatively $15 million

After he was released in 2016 - claiming he had 'new insight' into himself - he linked up with the Trump campaign and became the candidate's campaign manager during the crucial months surrounding the Republican National Convention.

His daughter Andrea took a different view of that. She wrote in a leaked text to a friend, who was not named in the leak: 'Trump probably has more morals than my dad. Which is really just saying something about my dad. My dad is a psycho!!! At least trump let his wives leave him. Plus, Trump has been a good father.'

And she also texted: 'Trump waited a little too long in my opinion, but I can attest to the fact that he has now hired one of the world's greatest manipulators. I hope my dad pulls it off. Then I can sell my memoir with all his dirty secrets for a pretty penny.'

But getting in tow with Trump in June 2016, his neighbor in Trump Tower, was to prove catastrophic. 

Trump in fact fired him in August 2017 when questions about Manafort's dealings with Russians in Ukraine started to surface.

Manafort returned to his shadowy lobbying life, but then he was caught up in the Mueller probe. 

In July 2017 his home in Alexandria was raided before dawn; in October he and his loyal deputy Gates were indicted, with charges of tax fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, failing to register as foreign agents and conspiracy against the United States.

Manafort's legal strategy was to split the cases in two, meaning two separate trials - one for the monetary charges, the second conspiracy and failing to register as a foreign agent.

But before they began, Gates took a plea bargain, turning on his boss, agreeing to cooperate fully and truthfully with Mueller. From there Manafort's path was consistently downhill. 

In Washington D.C. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, proved tough; she had him locked up before trial when Mueller accused him of witness tampering. 

Turned: Rick Gates 

That meant he attended his first trial, in Virginia, from jail, walking in every day with federal marshals and walking out in handcuffs.

In Virginia, Ronald Reagan-appointee T.S. Ellis III presided over the first trial in August 2018. Manafort and his supporters might have been cheered by his apparent toughness on the Mueller prosecutors, including berating them in front of the jury, and repeated demands for them to hurry up. 

But when the jury returned its guilty verdicts on eight of the 18 counts, other legal observers said Ellis was making sure the case could not be appealed. Ellis declared a mistrial on the remaining 10 counts, which meant that Mueller could keep them in reserve for a second trial.

And if there were any lingering thoughts that the judge had sympathy for the felon,  Ellis told Manafort that he would be wearing prison, not regular, clothing for subsequent hearings.

The next month his second trial was due to begin but Manafort then decided, finally, to seek a deal with Mueller, and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering. 

He also admitted to most of the 10 charges which the jury could not reach a verdict on the previous month, and - crucially - agreed to cooperate fully and truthfully with Mueller.

But he could not even manage that; by November, Mueller filed a court document accusing him of lying in breach of the plea deal.

The next month they revealed Manafort's attorney had briefed the White House on his dealings with Mueller. 

Then in January came a moment which showed Manafort still had the power to shock: Mueller revealed in a court filing that he had passed Trump campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, his one-time aide who has been named as a suspected Russian intelligence asset. 

In a February hearing Mueller's prosecutors went further, suggesting Manafort might have lied about passing on the polling data to boost his chances of a presidential pardon.

Judge Berman Jackson ruled he had lied and set his sentencing for March; his sentencing in Virginia will come after that.

If he were to get a pardon, the peril is hardly over; New York state's attorney general is investigating his tax fraud to see if he could be prosecuted for evading state taxes. Presidential pardons do not apply in state courts.

Left in tatters is a reputation, a fortune, and a family. 

His elder daughter, Jessica Manafort filed to change her name to Jessica Bond in August 2018, after his conviction, telling the Los Angeles Times: 'I am a passionate liberal and a registered Democrat and this has been difficult for me.'

Despite the clearly unhappy family, Manafort's wife Kathleen stood by him in the face of his infidelity.

She loyally attended each day of his tax fraud trial, always sitting in the row directly behind his defense table.

Tarnished legacy: Paul Manafort Sr. was three-term mayor of New Britain, CT

Since June 2018, Manafort has been incarcerated in a county jail in Alexandria.

Largely held in solitary confinement for his own safety, his health has clearly suffered. He attended some hearings in a wheelchair and his legal team disclosed he had been diagnosed with gout. 

Perhaps more stinging to his vanity, in a mug shot, the fashion-conscious Manafort sported a jailhouse jumpsuit and shadowy stubble. His brown hair, which he previously dyed, is now tinged with grey.

The former lobbyist, who once spent $18,000 on a python skin jacket, has also been forced to attend his trial without socks – because he reportedly balked at the white ones he is required to wear as an inmate.

He has depression and anxiety and his lawyers complained he had little contact with his family. In letters submitted ahead of his sentence family members pleaded for leniency. 

But there were no letters from the rich, powerful Republicans who Manafort had counted as his friends.  

Manafort's conviction even impacted the legacy of his father, the popular three-term mayor in New Britain, Connecticut, from 1965 to 1971.

In August 2018 the city changed a street named after the former mayor from 'Paul Manafort Drive' to 'Paul Manafort Sr. Drive.'