surfing stations until I got Canadian News and CNN is one off. As I hit it I noticed the woman (I don't know who she is) was interviewing an "expert" on Trump's court proceedings. I waited to see who he was when they put up the name and low and behold it was Ed O’Callaghan. I had never heard of him before (and certainly have never seen him) until recently from Empty Wheel. I am not sure what he is doing on CNN, perhaps trying to get ahead of things that he may have been involved with at SDNY and Cohen. I find it more than mere coincidence that he is now showing up on CNN. Here is how Marcy Wheeler described him:
Trump is also, undoubtedly, seeking details of then PADAG Ed O’Callaghan’s fuckery.
Once SDNY did charge Cohen, O’Callaghan intervened to demand that SDNY take language out of Cohen’s statement of offense making it clear that Individual-1 was part of the crime.
Consistent with DOJ guidelines, we first submitted the information to the Public Integrity Section at Main Justice. They signed off.
We then sent a copy to Rod Rosenstein, informing him that a plea was imminent. The next day, Khuzami, who was overseeing the case, received a call from O’Callaghan, Rosenstein’s principal deputy.
O’Callaghan was aggressive.
Why the length, he wanted to know. He argued that now that Cohen is pleading guilty we don’t need all this description.
Khuzami responded, What exactly are you concerned about?
O’Callaghan proceeded to identify specific allegations that he wanted removed, almost all referencing Individual-1. It quickly became apparent to Khuzami that, contrary to what O’Callaghan professed, it wasn’t the overall length or detail of the document that concerned him; it was any mention of Individual-1. Khuzami and O’Callaghan went through a handful of these allegations, some of which Khuzami agreed to strike; others, to ensure a coherent description of the crime, he did not.
Berman’s prosecutors stayed up all night cutting the Information from 40 pages to 21.
The team was tasked with the rewrite and stayed up most of the night. The revised information, now twenty-one pages, kept all of the charges but removed certain allegations, including allegations that Individual-1 acted “in concert with” and “coordinated with” Cohen on the illegal campaign contributions. The information now alleged that Cohen acted in concert and coordinated with “one or more members of the campaign.” But in the end, everything that truly needed to be in the information was still there.
Cohen included those details in his verbal allocution anyway.
The most consequential details that O’Callaghan wanted removed still wound up in the public record, simply because Cohen acknowledged them in open court. He testified that Trump not only knew about the six-figure payoffs designed to keep Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal from going public but had orchestrated them.
With regard to McDougal, Cohen said that he and “the candidate worked together to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information. After a number of discussions, we eventually accomplished the goal by the media company entering into a contract with the individual under which she received compensation of $150,000.”
As for Stormy Daniels, Cohen admitted that he had, “in coordination with, and at the direction direction of, the same candidate, [arranged] to make a payment to a second individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign to keep the individual from disclosing the information. To accomplish this, I used a company that was under my control to make a payment in the sum of $130,000.”
Any paperwork describing this dispute will not help Trump as much as an OLC memo saying his hush payments weren’t a federal crime. But he will use them to suggest that Rod Rosenstein didn’t think Trump was a part of it.
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I honestly think if either one had said that, they'd be forced to resign.
