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Michael Cohen open to spilling details on Trump to investigators: Report

President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen is open to sharing information on Trump with investigators, despite previously claiming he would “take a bullet” for the president, a new report says. “He knows a lot of things about the President and he’s not averse to talking in the right situation,” a friend of Cohen said, per CNN. “If they want information on Trump, he’s willing to give it.” Meanwhile, Cohen has felt distant from the president recently. “He feels let down by him and isolated by him,” a different friend told CNN.

The report comes after Cohen’s home and office were raided by the FBI in April, where agents seized computers, phones, and other materials of Cohen’s. The raid has taken a toll on him and his family, CNN reports. Cohen is under investigation to determine if he violated tax or campaign finance laws, but has not been charged with a crime yet. In the event that Cohen is indicted, defense lawyers do not expect he will be charged with wrongdoing until a probe of how the documents were obtained in the raid is conducted, according to CNN.

It’s uncertain if Cohen intends to comply with federal investigators, a choice that will be determined based on what is contained in a potential indictment. For example, a friend of Cohen told CNN that Cohen may plead guilty if an indictment is not as severe as anticipated. Earlier Tuesday, it was reported that Cohen had hired Guy Petrillo to represent him ahead of federal court proceedings in New York. Petrillo previously led the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, the same office that is probing Cohen’s business dealings.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/michael-cohen-open-to-spilling-details-on-trump-to-investigators-report

Obama holdovers at VOA failed to broadcast the Singapore summit into North Korea

In an act of gross neglect of their mission and their audience, U.S. officials in charge of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, and key Voice of America, or VOA, managers who are also senior government executives failed to boost shortwave and medium wave radio broadcasts to North Korea for the duration of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore.

Even before the summit, I started hearing rumors that Obama administration holdovers still running U.S. overseas broadcasting were not planning to give the North Koreans an extra chance to hear in real time what was happening in Singapore. North Korean listeners to U.S. radio broadcasts would get only their usual very few hours on shortwave and medium-wave radio frequencies, as if nothing of special importance was happening.

I heard afterwards that while the U.S. president and the North Korean dictator were signing their negotiated agreement, neither VOA nor the separately managed Radio Free Asia, or RFA, was on the air broadcasting to North Korea at all. The agency’s central management did nothing to enable their broadcasters to cover the historic event live with radio programs in Korean. To me it was an incredible failure of leadership — a failure of senior U.S. government executives to bring American news in real time to the people forced to live behind the curtain of total censorship and unspeakable repression.

Shortwave radio broadcasting is no longer the preferred medium of reaching audiences in many foreign countries, but it is still much needed and cannot be successfully replaced by any other media platform in North Korea. Transnational radio is the only way the North Koreans are able to learn what is happening in their own country and in the outside world without being exposed to a considerable risk of imprisonment or death. Even listening to radio in the privacy of one’s own home in North Korea is dangerous, but it is far safer than any other means of quickly getting uncensored outside information. Although a few North Koreans can access the Internet, no one except for Kim Jong Un and his spies can safely surf VOA or RFA websites. I was amazed that BBG and VOA officials would ignore this fact and do nothing to bring more news quickly and in real time to the people of North Korea during the Singapore summit.

The much better managed Radio Free Asia at least went on the air with substantial live coverage during its limited shortwave radio hours that are normally used for repeat programming. BBG executives should have also expanded RFA radio transmissions to North Korea by assigning to the station extra time and additional frequencies. I am told that they did not. RFA and VOA broadcasters had to do their best with what limited radio airtime they had. From what I could tell, BBG and VOA officials were primarily interested in getting Greta Van Susteren, who does pro bono work for VOA, to do a television interview with President Trump, which she did. I suspect they had to use her because some regular VOA Newsroom reporters have been caught in public calling President Trump “a joke,” along with obscene names on social media that cannot be reprinted in a newspaper op-ed. One actual VOA report compared Trump to Stalin and Mao. Other VOA journalists have posted unseemly jokes about first lady Melania Trump. Now the BBG and VOA officials who did nothing to prevent such unprofessional behavior at the Voice of America wanted a VOA interview with the president, presumably for publicity purposes in the U.S., and only Greta Van Susteren could get it. While they saw to their bureaucratic fiefdoms, North Koreans seeking VOA news were out of luck, due to a lack of increased radio transmissions to North Korea at least during the Trump-Kim summit.

I assume that the Greta Van Susteren-Trump interview was eventually translated into Korean and broadcast by radio after some delay, but there was no VOA Korean Service reporter standing next to Greta who could have asked President Trump a few clarifying questions specifically for the North Korean audience. That’s what should have been done to limit the misinterpretations and controversies which the Greta Van Susteren interview has indeed produced. I asked the Voice of America management for an explanation and was told initially that they would get back to me. When I did not hear anything for several days, I also wrote to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Again, there has been no response for three days. American taxpayers pay their salaries. The president’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2019, sent to Congress on Feb. 12, 2018, includes $661.1 million for the BBG.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/obama-holdovers-at-voa-failed-to-broadcast-the-singapore-summit-into-north-korea