If cover-up is the real crime, Trump's hush-money charges have a Nixonian ring | Sidney Blumenthal

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : Trump reviewed the smears before they appeared, and Cohen gave them a final stamp of approval.
56% : Trump directed his cover-up when he was a candidate, when he was the president-elect, and, in one instance, when he was president.
55% : Pecker had known Trump since 1998, when as a publisher he produced a quarterly magazine called Trump Style for Trump to distribute at his golf clubs, casinos, and hotels.
53% : During the presidential transition, Trump invited Pecker to Trump Tower to thank him "for handling the stories of the Doorman and Woman 1
51% : Trump asked Cohen in an audio recording.
50% : "The road map also laid out the potential consequences for Nixon if his cover-up had been exposed after his re-election: "If the cover-up and obstruction of justice that had already occurred came to light in the spring of 1973, not only would all the President's close advisors be subject to criminal liability but the President himself would have had to shoulder ultimate responsibility (moral, if not legal) for their actions.
49% : In the end, Cohen paid himself through the shell company after Trump agreed he would pay him back personally.
44% : Trump had announced his candidacy two months earlier.
43% : Essentially, Trump has been indicted on what the Watergate prosecutors in the road map called the "concealment theory" that was at the heart of Nixon's cover-up.
39% : David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media, Inc, which owned the National Enquirer and other tabloids, entered into a plea agreement for non-prosecution with the southern district in exchange for his confession that he engaged in a "catch and kill scheme" to discover and pay sources so they "did not publicize damaging allegations" about Trump "before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election".
37% : Per the indictment, the conspiracy began at a meeting in August 2015 at Trump Tower of Trump, Cohen and Pecker.
36% : "Trump, Cohen and Pecker held "a series of discussions about who should pay off Woman 1 to secure her silence", according to the statement of facts.
36% : Trump and Daniels had a sexual encounter in July 2006, at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe to which Trump had also brought McDougal ("Woman 1").
33% : Now, with Trump's chief media co-conspirator taking the non-prosecution deal, Trump has substituted his Truth Social site for the National Enquirer.
32% : "Echoing Nixon, Trump in his 2016 campaign conspired to exchange hush-money for silence about certain of his actions that he believed would cost him the election if the public knew about them.
31% : The next payment went to "Woman 1", Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year, whom Trump had met at a pool party at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006, three months after his wife Melania had given birth to their son.
30% : But Trump resisted paying, calculating that "if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public".
26% : The New York indictment alleges that Trump falsified his business records, committing tax fraud and violating campaign finance law, to prevent the voters from learning that he had paid bribes.
23% : If Trump seeks a pardon, he must throw himself on the mercy of the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul.
22% : The first payment went to a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin, who had bruited about the rumor that Trump had an illegitimate child with a housekeeper.
22% : Trump suggested an untraceable cash payment.
22% : "You can't knock the National Enquirer," Trump said, defending the tabloid libels, while falsely disclaiming any responsibility of his own for them.
21% : Bill Clinton was a cocaine addict who was not Chelsea Clinton's father.
20% : Trump and McDougal had an affair that lasted for ten months.
19% : That same weekend, Ronan Farrow has reported, Trump invited four other adult film actors to his hotel room for sex, offering one of them $10,000, but that they rejected him.
17% : On 14 February 2017, Valentine's Day, Cohen submitted fraudulent invoices for a fraudulent retainer for fraudulent services rendered that then president Trump paid with two checks from his trust, fraudulently recording them as retainers and stapled to the fraudulent invoices.
17% : But if Trump is convicted of any of the felony counts in his New York trial his fate will diverge from Nixon's.
16% : The revelation that Trump conspired to eliminate his Democratic opponent Joe Biden by withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine in exchange for bogus political dirt - which, we now know from the recent congressional testimony of one of the key co-conspirators, Lev Parnas, was fabricated by Russian intelligence - led to Trump's first impeachment.
14% : This case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney, however, reveals Trump as having essentially the same purpose as Richard Nixon in Watergate, hiding the truth through fraud and bribery in order to manipulate the outcome of a presidential election.
14% : Like Nixon, Trump conspired with others to achieve his ends.
9% : "Many if not most of the fabricated stories originated with Roger Stone, a former Nixon Committee To Re-Elect operative and a link between the "ratfucking" dirty tricks of the Nixon underworld and Trump's.
5% : In his January 6 coup, as if imitating Nixon, Trump demanded the resignation of his previously compliant attorney general, William Barr, when he declined to become involved in the patently illegal fake elector scheme, and tried to replace him with lackeys.

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