After Cohen’s Plea Deal, There’s Still No Evidence of Russian Collusion

• After Cohen’s Plea Deal, There’s Still No Evidence of Russian Collusion
  by BRIAN CATES, https://www.theepochtimes.com/
  In a surprise announcement, calculated to have maximum media impact just before President Donald Trump departed for Argentina to attend the annual G-20 summit, special counsel Robert Mueller and his team accepted a guilty plea in court from former Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen.
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  On Nov. 29, the media was suddenly alerted that Cohen was in a New York courtroom entering a plea of guilty to perjury charges. In his plea agreement, Cohen admitted he lied in his congressional testimony under oath when asked about details surrounding the proposed construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow. Specifically, Cohen admitted he misled Congress on the duration of the proposed deal and how much Trump himself was involved in it.
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  As evidence of Cohen’s perjury, Mueller submitted a series of emails between Cohen and Felix Sater, in which the two men discuss a real estate deal that never came to fruition. However, in the course of discussing the deal, a discussion that began in 2015, Sater began making overtures to Cohen once Trump announced his presidential run.
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  Sater boasted of deep connections to Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials, which he said he could leverage to help the Trump campaign win the 2016 election.
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  The New York Times broke the story of the Cohen/Sater emails more than a year ago, with a story, titled “Trump Associate Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected,’” on Aug. 28, 2017.
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  The Times story included a screenshot of an email that Sater sent to Cohen on Nov. 3, 2015, in which Sater said: “Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this.”
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  After much of the mainstream media spent all of Nov. 29 crowing about the supposed “smoking gun” of Cohen’s perjury plea and the renewed interest in his email exchange with Sater, by the afternoon of Nov. 30, CNN’s Jake Tapper was one of the first to begin carefully examining the actual evidence and asking hard questions.
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  In an interview on “The Lead,” Tapper surprised Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) by asking where the evidence of Russian collusion is.
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  What Happened?
  Here’s what actually transpired in that courtroom, stripped of all the Democratic National Committee (DNC) media complex spin: Cohen admitted to Mueller he didn’t tell the truth in his congressional testimony about how long the deal was discussed and how much Trump knew about it and … that’s it.
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