Russian Ruble Laundering Taxi Services, Inc.
The Trump administration is like a clever heist movie–“Ocean’s Eleven”, say–executed by middling Irish setters.
This is dribbling out. First the hush money, now the taxis. Josh Marshall’s suspicion that is is a lot bigger - and is time sensitive - sounds reasonable. What else will dribble out? Something ongoing and with a short fuse.
It’s goombahs all the way down.
I dunno about NY, but in the places I have lived the Taxi business was if not borderline criminal, full of unsavory players, specially in the old days when it was an all cash business, which provided lots of opportunities for money laundering… and nobody ever declared full earnings to the IRS
Cohen Search Warrants Sought Info On Hush Money Pay-Offs, Taxi Medallions
The only surprise is that it took so long.
Cohen has been crooked for a long time.
You can take the cabbie out of the cab, but you can’t take the cab out of the cabbie.
Perhaps he’s so inept that his communications with Trump and Satan and Manafort have been useful to overhear?
True. I suspect when this is all over this will be another of those “chicken or egg” prosecutions: the perp couldn’t really be nailed until a search warrant was issued and evidence was seized… but a search warrant couldn’t be issued until there was sufficient evidence that something was afoot. And around and around, like a dog chasing its tail. He’s obviously been getting away with this nonsense for years, and it’s only because of Mueller’s otherwise unrelated investigation that they caught a break here.
Taxi medallion sales tax infractions and porn star hush money. If that’s it it’s small potatoes compared to the Russian connections, Ukraine monkey business and other more promising intrigues I was hoping were afoot.
All good stuff. Of course, as the threads unravel, I suspect a lot of Dem pols are gonna start getting a little nervous around the 5 Boroughs.
An orange jumpsuit for the owner of the National Inquirer as well as Cohen would be quite a cherry on the sundae.
“Hey, who cut the flounder?”
This is all 3-dimensional chess by Trump to drain the swamp. He purposefully fired Comey so that a Special Prosecutor would be named who would clean up all the dirty business by him and the various criminals that he has surrounded himself with.
Sez who? 
Perhaps so, but if jail for tax evasion instead of murder was good enough for Al Capone, it’ll do for Trump. He’s 71 and has some very unhealthy habits so 15 years would be a life sentence.
If it also takes out his family’s grift business and throws their sorry asses behind bars for a decade or more (and wipes them clean of all assets), I’d be okay with that.
And all of these crimes violate New York law as well as federal law, so if Trump decides to pardon Cohen, NY AG Schneiderman is waiting in the wings.
With Gates, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Page, Cohen, Sessions, Flynn, and my fingers are getting tired so whoever else, oh right Stone, Sonny, honestly it never ends, you’ve got a lot of arrows pointing a long way east. These people are brazen and sloppy. No need to think the big charges are getting away just yet.