CONFLICT: Cohen Prosecutor’s Wife’s Firm Is Being Investigated By The Trump Administration
Patrick Howley
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The New York deputy U.S. Attorney who accepted Michael Cohen’s plea deal, Robert Khuzami, is married to a lobbyist whose Chicago-based clearing house is currently being investigated by President Donald Trump’s SEC director.
This clear conflict of interest taints the case being waged against Trump through Cohen, according to Washington insiders.
The anti-Trump conspirators are changing their strategy. Since Robert Mueller found no Russian collusion and his team is tainted by Clinton conflicts of interest and ethical breaches, the conspirators are now focusing on the Cohen case waged by the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York. Mueller is not going to score, so Democrats are banking on Khuzami instead.
Fired former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose former underlings are now running the ship on the anti-Trump case, is making the new strategy clear:
Practice note: Trump has no effective way to shut down any investigation being conducted by SDNY. That office is more insulated, enduring and “sovereign” than the Special Counsel’s Office. You can fire Mueller. You can fire the US Attorney. You can’t fire the SDNY.
— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) August 23, 2018
But Khuzami and his team are colored by their own conflicts of interest.
Khuzami was the general counsel of Deutsche Bank, which has taken a sizable hit due to Trump tariffs and the Brexit election, prompting the bank to advocate against protectionist trade policies. The Deutsche Bank CEO has spoken out against Trump’s policies and in favor of so-called “free trade.”
Khuzami’s wife Julie Bauer is senior vice president of Options Clearing Corporation since September 2016. She previously handled government relations for FINRA.
The Wall Street Journal report just this month: “The company tasked with curbing risk in the U.S. options market is under investigation by federal regulators for how it handled a recent period of market turbulence, according to people familiar with the matter. The probes from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission include concerns that Options Clearing Corp. failed to accurately forecast how much cash would be needed to cover trading losses triggered by a spike in volatility last February, some of the people said.”
How interesting!
A well-connected Washington insider tells Big League Politics about the anti-Trump plotters’ change in strategy:
“Mueller and Rosenstein are smart enough to realize that the Special Counsel is too tainted to be effective due to the corruption uncovered about Strzok, Ohr and Steele. I suspect they realize that in order to draw away Republicans in an impeachment trial, they need to faint a clean investigative unit. So their strategy was to go after Trump through Cohen in New York. They either knew or were sure that the New York appointed US Attorney Geoffrey Berman would recuse himself and that would leave Preet Bharara’s leftovers.”
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