Trump Biographer: President’s Entire Campaign Was Likely a ‘Criminal Conspiracy’

Tim O’Brien—who penned a 2005 biography about Donald Trump—said Sunday that the emerging raft of legal documents reveal that Donald Trump's presidential campaign was likely a “criminal conspiracy" that commited "criminal acts."

During MSNBC’s Joy AM host Joy Reid asked O’Brien to comment on the growing scandals and investigations surrounding the president, including the special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, hush money payments and a defamation lawsuit by Summer Zervos.

“What we’ve learnt from this raft of legal documents that have landed in our lap over the last couple of weeks is that there’s the very real possibility that the Trump campaign was a criminal conspiracy from its beginnings and that bled into the Trump transition, where various criminal acts might have been committed,” O’Brien said. “Now you have the Trump White House dealing with the consequences of all these.”

The biographer and columnist then goes on to dissect Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s distraction-based defense strategy.

“When you have Rudy Giuliani as the carnival barker, distracting people, focusing only on campaign finance issues, focusing inaccurately on campaign finance issues. It distracts from the larger halo of illegality hanging over this entire Trump team,” O’Brien continued.

“Trump and his advisers have put out three defenses in the wake of Cohen’s sentencing memo. That Michael Cohen cannot be trusted—he is a dishonest narrator—that he was giving the president advice and it wasn’t the other way around, and none of it had anything to do with the election.”

“You can pick apart on the fact pattern in all three of those things. Specifically, it had nothing to do with the election and that it was Cohen taking advice from Trump, rather than Trump being the architect of most of these issues,” the biographer added.

Earlier this week, Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, was sentenced to 36 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to multiple federal crimes, including lying to Congress, campaign finance violations and tax fraud. Although Cohen said he knew paying hush money to women who claimed to have affairs with the then-presidential candidate in the lead up to the 2016 election “was wrong”, he asserted he did so under instruction from Trump.

“Today is one of the most meaningful days of my life. The irony is that today I get my freedom back,” Cohen said in court. “Blind loyalty to this man led me to choose a path of darkness over light.”