DEMS/GOP/MICHAEL COHEN/PAUL MANFORT/ROBERT MUELLER/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Two courtroom decisions within minutes of each other, each with eight convictions, against President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and campaign chairman engulfed Capitol Hill on Tuesday [8-21-18], where Republicans downplayed the connection of both cases to the White House while Democrats seized on the President’s potential role and raised the prospect that he could have broken the law, too. The guilty plea from Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen and the guilty verdicts against Paul Manafort once again scrambled the narrative for the President and special counsel Robert Mueller, prompting dueling reactions from senators peppered with questions about the latest developments…If Democrats win control of the House in November, Nadler is expected to take the gavel of the Judiciary Committee, the panel that would likely lead impeachment proceedings. Nadler’s comments Tuesday are the closest he’s come to raising the prospect of impeachment, as to date he has tamped down the impeachment calls from some of his Democratic colleagues. In less than an hour Tuesday, Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of financial crimes — with a mistrial declared for the other 10 — and then Cohen entered a plea deal and said that “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” he had kept information that would have been harmful to the candidate and the campaign from becoming public.”
–Lauren Fox and Jeremy Herb, “GOP lawmakers try to distance Trump from Manafort and Cohen as Democrats pounce,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, August 21, 2018 11:10 pm