FILE – This April 11, 2018 file photo shows attorney Michael Cohen in New York. President Donald Trump said Sunday, April 15, 2018, that all lawyers are now “deflated and concerned” by the FBI raid on his personal attorney Cohen’s home and office. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
The news cycle has been insane the past few days so this hasn’t gotten much press, but it’s a pretty big deal.
After the Mueller report failed to deliver the silver bullet against Trump, those obsessed with taking him out (because it’s not like we have an election next year or something) needed a new hope. It couldn’t just be over and rationality that perhaps Trump simply didn’t break any laws wasn’t entertained. Instead, the dream shifted to the SDNY.
Take this piece over at Newsweek.
Legal analyst and Above the Law editor Elie Mystal told MSNBC on Saturday said that if President Donald Trump isn’t reelected in 2020, he could be arrested immediately by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) when he leaves the White House.
During a segment on AM Joy, Mystal explained to host Joy Reid that the SDNY investigation has elevated the stakes for the president when it comes to winning the 2020 presidential election.
“The irony here, that I hope it is not lost on people, is that the Trump Organization, which appears to be a massive criminal front, is so small potatoes that if Trump hadn’t run for president, SDNY wouldn’t care,” he said. “SDNY cares about stopping terrorists.
“Putting SDNY on the Trump investigation is a little bit like bringing in Sherlock Holmes to figure out who framed Roger Rabbit,” Mystal continued. “These people are such cartoonish criminals that now that SDNY is on it, they’re all going down.”
Or this piece at NBC.
Cohen’s cooperation “would send a chill up my spine” if he worked at the White House, former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who also was a federal prosecutor, told ABC News during the hearing, referring to the ex-Trump fixer’s statement to lawmakers that he was helping prosecutors in their Trump-related investigations.
Or this one from Bloomberg.
In the span of one week, we learned that the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York had both secured a guilty pleafrom Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen and offered an immunity deal to the company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. President Donald Trump should be worried. Once the Southern District gets its jaws onto a string of crimes, it doesn’t let go.
Weisselberg, as part of his deal, will likely be required to provide information on all criminal activity he knows about. That spells potential disaster for Trump personally, and major problems for his presidency. That’s apart from any potential state-level criminal investigation by the New York district attorney’s office.
You see, according to the media, the SDNY were pit-bulls. They were the career prosecutors free of scope limits and restraint. That was going to make all the difference. In fact, the real danger for Trump was never Robert Mueller’s investigation, no it’s always been the SDNY and they aren’t going to let this go. There were even #SDNY hashtags and T-shirts.

Well, so much for that. It was just announced yesterday that the SDNY’s investigation into the Trump organization and the Michael Cohen related “hush money” payments is over.
Judge William H. Pauley III announced that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York revealed this development to the court in a status report, as media companies including The New York Times, Associated Press, CNN, and Dow Jones & Co. have pushed to unseal the search warrant materials related to the case. The end of the investigation likely means no additional charges will be filed against anyone, including the president.
“We are pleased that the investigation surrounding these ridiculous campaign finance allegations is now closed,” Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow said in a statement. “We have maintained from the outset that the President never engaged in any campaign finance violation.”
And with that, the last great hope for the left to nail Trump on something criminal has breathed its last breath. There will be no Trump in handcuffs. The SDNY isn’t going to expose mountains of fraud within the Trump organization and Cohen will not be bringing anyone along with him to prison.
As an aside, I could write another entire piece about how this shows just how clueless our chattering class in the media actually are. The grand pronouncements on the cable networks, the scathing, faux intellectual editorials, and the confident claims on Twitter, all completely wrong. Again.
But I’m sure there’s some state investigation they’ll latch onto now as the “real” threat to Trump. It never stops and they never actually learn anything from their past failures.