Michael Cohen plea puts Trump on defensive, media into overdrive

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Kurtz: Forget the spin, this is a rough period for Trump

'MediaBuzz' host Howard Kurtz weighs in on the mounting pressure against President Trump after Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen faced guilty charges mere moments apart.

Yes, it's true, neither of the bombshell convictions that rocked the media and political world within minutes has anything to do with Russian collusion.

But the Michael Cohen guilty plea, as well as the Paul Manafort jury verdict, has huge political implications for President Trump that will play out over the coming weeks and months.

Let's cut through the spin. In much of the media, Tuesday's developments in courtrooms in New York and Virginia are getting the Watergate treatment, with lots of speculative pieces about impeachment (which Democratic leaders have said they're not pursuing). "Legal Blows Fuel Impeachment Fears," blared Politico.

There is little doubt that many journalists are reveling in the convictions as vindicating their dark view of Trump.

At the same time, in media precincts friendly to the president, there is plenty of deflection and minimization. A campaign finance violation – which Cohen admitted in saying Trump had directed him to help buy the silence of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal – is little more than a speeding ticket. No one in the Real America cares about Trump's involvement with a porn star and a Playboy model. And what about Hillary?

But neither the positive nor negative media chatter can obscure the fact that the dual events were a very tough development for the president. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, "No day during President Trump's 19 months in office could prove as dangerous or debilitating as Tuesday."

What was telling in the first 24 hours was that the White House didn't send anyone to the television studios to defend the president. Rudy Giuliani put out a statement, talked to a reporter or two, and that was it.

Lanny Davis, meanwhile, has been on a television blitz, saying that Cohen, his client, is telling the truth and has far more stuff to tell prosecutors if they are interested. Davis said the president's former attorney is raising money on a GoFundMe site and wouldn't accept a pardon from "a dangerous person in the Oval Office."

It fell to the president to defend himself on Twitter. He said he felt badly for the "brave" Manafort who, "unlike Michael Cohen ... refused to 'break' — make up stories in order to get a 'deal.'"

And in a taped interview with Ainsley Earhardt of "Fox & Friends" airing today, Trump said he only knew about Cohen's hush money payments "later on," which contradicts the lawyer's account.

Trump also contended that Cohen pled guilty to two campaign finance violations that "are not a crime." (Prosecutors obviously disagree.) He noted that an Obama campaign violation was "easily settled." In 2013, Barack Obama’s campaign and the DNC paid a $375,000 fine for a missing a series of required notices in the election's last 20 days involving donations of more than $1.8 million.

Look, this is not the rantings of Omarosa. For months, every time I wrote or spoke about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels or the $150,000 payment (through American Media Inc.) to Karen McDougal, I took plenty of heat from viewers and readers who said no one cared about allegations of decade-old affairs involving a celebrity businessman. And that's largely true. But it was never about the gossip. I've watched enough investigations to know that the financial paper trail could cause legal problems for the president and those around him.

Yes, this is far afield from Bob Mueller's mandate to investigate possible Russian collusion. But Ken Starr began with the Whitewater land deal and wound up with Monica Lewinsky, which led to Bill Clinton's impeachment. Sarah Huckabee Sanders called impeachment talk a "sad attempt" by the Democrats, but in truth there hasn't been much of it.

No matter how the partisans and the pundits try to spin it, there are some difficult days ahead for the Trump presidency.