IT'S A RICO CASE:

The president began by insisting that the government, of which he is the chief executive, is a perpetrator of gross misconduct. Cohen, Trump said, "pled to two counts that aren't a crime, which nobody understands." Trump said that, based on the information he gathered from watching "two shows," the criminal conduct to which Cohen pleaded guilty and the version of events to which he attested should never have been accepted by government prosecutors. The fact that they were, so this thinking goes, amounts to either incompetence or gross misconduct and corruption.

Trump went on to attack his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions. The president insisted that the civil violation of campaign finance law attributed to Barack Obama's 2008 campaign is materially worse than the alleged felony violation of campaign finance law in which Cohen accused the president of being complicit. Trump attributed the substantial fines levied on the Obama campaign as a result of these violations without the possibility of jail time to the fact that Eric Holder was a more honest attorney general. "We have somebody that they seem to like to go after a lot of Republicans," Trump said of Jeff Sessions, of all people.

But the worst was yet to come. "One of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial," the president said of his former campaign chairman. "I know all about 'flipping,'" he continued. "Everything's wonderful, and then they get ten years in jail, and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed." The president went on to diminish the eight counts of bank and tax fraud of which a jury found Manafort guilty as "not a big deal."'

The gall of this assertion from the president of the United States is staggering. The chief executor of the nation's laws has, in effect, come out in opposition to turning state's evidence.

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