The President is a Crook
By 
Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney for President Donald Trump, has pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges. Two of the charges are campaign finance offenses involving his payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, two women who say they had affairs with Trump.
Strikingly, Cohen admitted in court that he worked “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” to make one payment; the other was made merely “in coordination with” the candidate. While Trump wasn’t named, that effectively implicates him in the underlying crimes here: willfully causing an illegal corporate contribution and making an excessive campaign contribution.
Several law professors told my colleague Sean Illing that if Cohen’s account can be proven, it means Trump himself is guilty of federal crimes. “Although the president is not named in the charges, he is all but an unindicted co-conspirator,” Duke’s Lisa Kern Griffin told Illing.
Matthews does a good job of outlining the debate over whether a sitting president can be indicted. The Constitution does not answer the question; it’s a political one. As a practical matter, the DOJ is not going to indict Trump, and assuming Kavanaugh is confirmed an already very unlikely state indictment is unlikely to survive the federal judiciary. The only remedy for Trump’s misconduct is the ballot box.
But Trump is a crook. That he won’t be held accountable while in office doesn’t change that.