Mickey Cohen’s Big Day: What About Laura Shusterman?

Mickey Cohen’s, Trump’s lawyer and fixer for over ten years is set to be sentenced to prison today. Bye, bye, Mickey. He admitted committing several felonies. He lied to Congress about his work for Trump in trying to get Moscow to approve a Trump building and several other things which were incorporated into one charge; he violated campaign finance laws by paying women for their silence about his client’s dalliances with them; and he didn’t pay taxes on much of his income, defrauded banks, among other things.

That’s a pretty good bag of felonies which should deserve a pretty big hit. Mickey’s problem is he’s not a tough guy as he pretended to be. With his law ticket he worked for Trump bullying people. He was really tough against the little people who tried to collect money for work done for Trump. He’d frighten them off with talk that it would take little imagination that  it might not be in their best interest to pursue the case. After speaking with him even the dullest could see their choice was to drop the suit or take pennies on the dollar or perhaps finding themselves standing  under the Hudson River in their new concrete shoes. Oh, nothing specific was said, the ideas were conveyed in such a way that they’d never come back to bite.

Mickey sat behind his impressive mahogany desk in his lavish office and dressed impeccably used his smooth talk both to advance his client’s interest and scare off litigants. He could do this because he made sure people knew he was connected. To Trump? No. Trump was being sued so the litigant didn’t fear him.

Everyone knows Mickey cooperated against Trump. Like those people suing Trump, he was not afraid of Trump. So he threw him to the wolves turning on his client hoping to save himself. He also provided the necessary documents to support his betrayal of the guy who had given him an easy living.

His lawyers crowed in their sentencing memorandum about how well Mickey cooperated. Others wrote on his behalf telling what a good guy he was or still is. All asked the judge to keep him on the street. They wanted him to do no time in prison. After all he implicated his client in his crimes. His defense is: “My client made me do it!” That has never been a good defense for a lawyer.

The prosecutors then added their two cents to the judge about what Mickey’s sentence should be. They told the judge Mickey was trying to con him. He never signed a cooperation agreement with them. He only cooperated in specific areas but not in others. They explained that with them you cooperate fully or not at all. In a lengthy filing they want the judge to hit him hard with a substantial prison sentence of four years.

When I heard that I said “that’s substantial?” Then I thought how I’ve always believed Mickey wasn’t a tough guy. I’ve been saying since day one that he was obviously not a guy who can do time. A week in prison for Mickey will be intolerable even if he goes to a country club or perhaps bunks in with Bernie Madoff. I’m betting money when the judge hits him he’ll start crying.

Why then didn’t Mickey cooperated fully? It was for the same reason he could conjure up frightful ideas in the minds of those suing his client. He was connected.

He’s connected to the Russian Mafia. His uncle gave him a piece of a joint where they hang out. He has contact with its head in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach also known as Little Odessa as well as others. They are not such a nice group of people. Best not to cross them.

But what about Mickey’s wife Laura Shusterman? More on that after we learn Mickey’s sentence.

 

 

22 Comments

  1. Awwww …. Someone is going to be drinking pro bono on ” Mickey Flynn ” for awhile !!!!!!!!

  2. it is a no brainer that we consider Matt Connolly
    ou Legal Bartender
    all drinks are served Pro Bono,eh?

    So the legal question on the rocks for Matt today is

    Did FBI agents serve American Voters and Taxpayers
    a Mickey Flynn ?

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/lt-gen-michael-flynn-details-unusual-fbi-questioning-asks-for-probation_2737335.html

    Flynn Sentencing Memo Details Unusual FBI Questioning, Asks for Probation
    BY PETR SVAB
    December 12, 2018 Updated: December 12, 2018Share

    Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is re

    in other anxieties

    https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/2018/12/12/mmiw-ashley-heavyrunner-loring-blackfeet/2283904002/

    Senators press FBI, BIA for answers to Ashley HeavyRunning Loring’s disappearance and the crisis of missing, murdered Native women
    Kristen Inbody, Great Falls TribunePublished 5:10 p.m. MT Dec. 12, 2018 | Updated 6:53 p.m. MT Dec. 12, 2018

    https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/12/12/he-got-screwed-gillum-absent-from-indictment-after-desantis-bashed-him-as-corrupt-742989

    ‘He got screwed’: Gillum absent from indictment after DeSantis bashed him as corrupt
    By MARC CAPUTO 12/12/2018 09:09 PM EST

  3. Seems so . Khalid knows .

  4. wa-llah! 36 months. With good time (15%), and, a year off for the drug program, Cohen will do about twenty months. He’s a cheese eating rat. SDNY wants him to snitch on his father-in-law. Cohen has Yidisha Uky connects through his wife. He appears daunted by the looming consequences of such a family betrayal. Daddio has a long reach.

  5. aw shucks

    welcome to Matt Conolly’s neighborhood boys and girls

    in other anxieties

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/13-shocking-facts-about-special-prosecutor-robert-mueller/5616426

    13 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller

    By Washington’s Blog
    Global Research, September 19, 2018
    Washington’s Blog 1 November 2017
    Region: USA
    Theme: Intelligence, Law and Justice, Media Disinformation
    print 415 73 14 525

    First published in November 2017. Can we trust Robert Mueller with Trump-Russia probe?

    ***

    Talking heads act like Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is fair, impartial and unbiased.

    But the facts are a wee bit different …

    Failure to Aggressively Prosecute the BCCI Scandal

    The BBC noted:

    [Mueller] is also known for leading the probe into the 1991 collapse of the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

    Williams Safire wrote in the New York Times:

    The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system.

    For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the most evil of purposes — while lawmen and regulators slept.

    Now the fight among investigators is coming out into the open. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who gave impetus to long-contained probes, told a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John Kerry that he is getting no cooperation from the Thornburgh Justice Department.

    Justice’s Criminal Division chief, Robert Mueller, tells me he will have a hatchet-burying session with the independent-minded D.A. next week, and vehemently denies having told British intelligence to stop cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury.

    Mueller’s handling of the BCCI scandal as the point man for the Justice Department was widely criticized. As noted by a Senate report written by Senators Kerry and Brown:

    Over the past two years, the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, reflecting similar criticism on the part of several Congressmen, including the chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Kerry; the chief Customs undercover officer who handled the BCCI drug-money laundering sting, Robert Mazur; his superior at Customs, Commissioner William von Raab; New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; former Senate investigator Jack Blum, and, within the Justice Department itself, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Dexter Lehtinen.

    Typical editorials criticized Justice’s prosecution of BCCI as “sluggish,” “conspicuously slow,” “inattentive,” and “lethargic.” Several editorials noted that there had been “poor cooperation” by Justice with other agencies. One stated that “the Justice Department seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed on” to regulators and others. Another that “the Justice Department’s secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation than any so far offered.

    ***

    Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and, at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both

    ***

    Suddenly, on August 22, Dennis Saylor, chief assistant to Assistant Attorney General Mueller, called Lehtinen and, according to the US Attorney, “indicated to me that I was directed not to return the indictment.”

    The Senate Report also noted:

    While the Justice Department’s handling of BCCI has received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for breaking open the BCCI investigation.

    ***

    In going after BCCI, Morgenthau’s office quickly found that in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI, including at various times, BCCI’s multitude of prominent and politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI’s accountants, BCCI’s shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

    Squashing Warning Signs that May Have Stopped 9/11

    Larry Klayman writes:

    Robert Mueller first hit my radar … just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.

    ***

    I came to meet and later represent FBI Special Agents Robert Wright and John Vincent, of the agency’s Chicago Counter-Terrorism Field Office. During our meeting, both Special Agents Wright and Vincent revealed to me that they had been conducting a counterterrorism investigation of Saudi money laundering into and in the United States, and they both believed that a massive terrorist attack was imminent.

    In the course of this investigation, both special agents had asked a fellow FBI agent who was undercover, one of Muslim descent, to be wired to turn up further evidence of this terrorist operation. The Muslim agent refused, indignantly telling both Wright and Vincent that Muslims don’t spy and rat on other Muslims. In shock, my soon-to-be clients reported this to their supervisors at the FBI, but no action was taken. To make matters worse, Wright’s and Vincent’s FBI supervisors quashed their investigation. They both believed that the order to kill the investigation came from the highest reaches of the FBI, and, upset it not outraged by this cover-up, Wright then decided to write a book detailing this breach of FBI honor.

    The only way I could explain this cover-up was that then-FBI Director Robert Muellerwas sensitive to the ties between the family of President George W. Bush and the Saudi royal family.

    ***

    Director Mueller, along with his “yes men” supervisors at the agency, not only quashed my clients’ investigation and ignored the disloyalty of the Muslim undercover agent, but then missed the warning signs leading up to September 11 – the biggest intelligence failure in American history, even surpassing Pearl Harbor.

    But shamelessly, despite this historic intelligence failure and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks that ensued, Mueller later led an effort to drum both Special Agents Wright and Vincent out of the FBI, in part by attempting to remove their security clearances, as a “reward” for their candor.

    FBI special agent – and a 2002 Time Person of the Year – Colleen Rowley points out:

    The FBI and all the other officials claimed that there were no clues, that they had no warning [about 9/11] etc., and that was not the case. There had been all kinds of memos and intelligence coming in.

    But overwhelming evidence shows that 9/11 was foreseeable. Indeed, Al Qaeda crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was itself foreseeable. Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.

    Mueller was one of the people who dropped the ball and let 9/11 happen.

    Allowing Escape of Saudi Persons Connected to Bin Laden

    Right after 9/11, American airspace was closed down. Yet Mueller was one of the people who allowed relatives of Bin Laden and other persons of interest fly back to Saudi Arabia.

    Entrapping Innocent People for P.R. Purposes

    After dropping the ball, Mueller then went on to entrap innocent people for P.R. purposes.

    And Rowley notes:

    In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the “post 9/11 round-up” of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI “progress” in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists.

    9/11 Cover Up

    Rowley says:

    TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11.

    In addition, Rowley says that the FBI sent Soviet-style “minders” to her interviews with the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation of 9/11, to make sure that she didn’t say anything the FBI didn’t like. The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 confirmed that government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses (and see this).

    Mueller’s FBI also obstructed the 9/11 investigation in many other ways. For example, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location. See this and this.

    Harper’s notes:

    Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.

    Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details …

    ***

    Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location ‘for his own safety.’

    Graham also wrote that the FBI also “insisted that we could not, even in the most sanitized manner, tell the American people that an FBI informant had a relationship with two of the hijackers.”

    And Kristen Breitweiser – one of the four 9/11 widows instrumental in forcing the government to form the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 2001 attacks – points out:

    Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquiry’s investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.

    Iraq War

    Rowley notes:

    When you had the lead-up to the Iraq War … Mueller and, of course, the CIA and all the other directors, saluted smartly and went along with what Bush wanted, which was to gin up the intelligence to make a pretext for the Iraq War. For instance, in the case of the FBI, they actually had a receipt, and other documentary proof, that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had not been in Prague, as Dick Cheney was alleging. And yet those directors more or less kept quiet. That included … CIA, FBI, Mueller, and it included also the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey.

    Torture

    Rowley also points out:

    Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any “war crimes files” were made to disappear. Not only did “collect it all” surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller’s (and then Comey’s) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.

    Anthrax Frame-Up

    Mueller also presided over the incredibly flawed anthrax investigation.

    The U.S. Government Accountability Office says the FBI’s investigation was “flawed and inaccurate”. The investigation was so bogus that a senator called for an “independent review and assessment of how the FBI handled its investigation in the anthrax case.”

    The head of the FBI’s anthrax investigation says the whole thing was a sham. He says that the FBI higher-ups “greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation”, that there were “politically motivated communication embargoes from FBI Headquarters”.

    The FBI’s anthrax investigation head said that the FBI framed scientist Bruce Ivins. On July 6, 2006, he filed a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303, which noted:

    (j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.

    Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ andFBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.

    In other words, Mueller presided over the attempt to frame an innocent man (and see this).

    Unsure If Government Can Assassinate U.S. Citizens Living On U.S. Soil

    Rather than saying “of course not!”, Mueller said that he wasn’t sure whether Obama had the right to assassinate Americans living on American soil.

    Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley commented at the time:

    One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.

    ***

    He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power. For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”

    Crippled Investigations of Financial Fraud … Helping to Allow the Great Recession

    In a 2013 piece entitled “Mueller: I Crippled FBI Effort v. White-Collar Crime“, the country’s top white collar crime expert, William Black – who put over 1,000 top S&L executives in jail for fraud, and is a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri – wrote:

    The FBI never developed “an intelligence operation” “to analyze threats” of even epidemic fraud.

    ***

    White-collar crime investigations and prosecutions are massive money makers that reduce the deficit, but Mueller, Holder, and Obama refuse to make these points and refuse to prosecute the elite bank fraudsters. On substantive and political grounds their actions are either inexplicable or all too explicable and support my readers’ belief that the FBI leadership no longer wants to investigate and prosecute the elite bank frauds.

    This is important because:

    Fraud CAUSED the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis
    Numerous Nobel prize winning economists say that we need to prosecute fraud, or else the economy will never truly stabilize
    After the Great Depression, the government cracked down on Wall Street fraud. But Mueller and other Bush and Obama administration officials let it slide
    (There are a lot of people more responsible for the Great Recession – and for lack of reform afterwards – than Mueller. For example, Mueller’s boss (the FBI is a part of the Department of Justice) made it more or less official policy not to prosecute financial fraud. But this is another example of Mueller dropping the ball.

    Spying on Americans

    Mueller participated in one of the greatest expansions of mass surveillance in human history.

    As we noted in 2013:

    NBC News reports:

    NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.

    On March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee:

    We have put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.

    Remember, the FBI – unlike the CIA – deals with internal matters within the borders of the United States.

    On May 1st of this year, former FBI agent Tim Clemente told CNN’s Erin Burnett that all present and past phone calls were recorded:

    BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone fcompanies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

    CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the ainvestigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

    BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

    CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

    The next day, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:

  6. What does any of this have to do with Russian ‘collusion’ in the 2016 Presidential Campaign?

    • So you don’t care that Mueller’s investigation turned up info that Trump is a felon? Does that go for all criminals that have evidence of unrelated crimes turn up when they are investigated for other crimes? If John Gotti was being investigated for tax evasion and turned out they had him for wire fraud, would you be OK with letting him slide on the wire fraud?
      YOU MAKE NO SENSE

  7. Except Danny Boy, of course . Luminous … Luminous …. I’m a gonna let it Shinnnnne …This etc etc etc ..

  8. Too many yahoos projecting entirely too much on this bit player !!!

    Amateurs

  9. when a pickpocket stands in the middle
    of a group of saints
    all he sees is their pockets

    in other anxieties….

    https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/russia-sends-2-nuclear-capable-bombers-to-venezuela

    Russia sends 2 nuclear-capable bombers to Venezuela
    by VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press

    also see

    https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-deputy-charged-20181211-story.html

    L.A. County sheriff’s deputy charged with voluntary manslaughter in first on-duty shooting prosecution in nearly 20 years

    whoa…

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-evanston-cop-international-drug-conspiracy-20181211-story.html

    DEA agent in Chicago charged with conspiring to traffic guns and drugs with international gang, 8 murders….

    • Freeh :

      Trump is constrained to a dangerous degree in his ability to negotiate with Rowdy Vladdy Putin in a Nicky Kruschev and fearless Fidel gotterdammerung …. Obscenario ( neologism ) .

      The self-indulgent breathless breast beating of the the Digital Age’s Legion Of Saints , the Democratic Party , and their simplistic reduction of all rational argument to the prism of … Have You Seen The Light Yet Motherfuckers ..No … Well … Boom there it is !!!!!!!! …has consequences . Bad ones .

  10. It isn’t necessary to use campaign funds to violate election law. The government views these bribes as under-the-table payments intended to advance Trump’s candidacy, as indeed they were. Then there’s the smell test: A porn star and a Playboy model are paid six-figure bribes to keep quiet about their assignations with DJT. I can’t remember which of these encounters occurred while Melania was pregnant, but it’s easy to see why candidate Trump wanted to keep this quiet.

    • I see Cohen is getting three years in jail. Maybe he can join a gang in prison. Winning acceptance from an elite convict organization would certainly boost his badly damaged sense of self-esteem. When not engaged in gang activities, Cohen could start penning a tell-all book about Trump.

  11. Not even worth addressing this nonsense about FELONIES WHILE DRIVING REPUBLICAN .

  12. When ” MICKEY ” ….gets …”Hit” …by a Judge as described by a former prosecutor , ADA , who knows the difference between Mickey Cohen and Michael Cohen apparently as well as he knows the difference between being inside and outside a courtroom — …… Houston, We have a bogey !!!!!!

    Pretty snappy there Sporty Connolly !!!

    Seriously .

    • He looks like such a nice Yiddisha Boy. Probably getting back at the world for all the lunch money he had taken off him.

      Jail will do him good. The cooking lessons and golfing will ground him.

  13. “…he violated campaign finance laws by paying women for their silence about his client’s dalliances with them.”

    This is almost certainly not a violation of campaign finance laws, no more so than paying for a cab or a cup of coffee is. The money wasn’t paid out of Trump’s campaign funds. It was a personal transaction. And it is not against the law.

    One issue for Cohen is that he was scared by the Feds, and plead guilty to many things that are not crimes, and he could have certainly beat if he defended himself.