President Donald Trump in Gulfport, Miss., Nov. 26, 2018.

Alex Brandon/AP/Shutterstock

On Friday evening, both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and prosecutors for the Southern District of New York filed memos offering sentence recommendations for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s embattled former attorney who has been a focal point for investigations spanning both offices. The memos were pretty damning for Cohen’s former boss. Mueller wrote that Trump told Cohen to reach out to the Russian government in late 2015, and that he pursued a lucrative real estate deal that would have likely required the cooperation of the Kremlin well into the 2016 campaign. The SDNY wrote that Trump directed Cohen to commit felony campaign finance violations prior to the 2016 election. Trump didn’t seem to think any of this was that big of a deal. “Totally clears the President,” he tweeted shortly after the filings were made. “Thank you!” 

On Monday morning, Trump continued to claim he did nothing wrong while also raising the possibility that the president of the United States doesn’t know how to spell “smoking.”

The “simple private transaction” to which the president is referring is a hush money payment of $130,000 given to porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had an affair. The payment was made by Cohen through a shell company, and, given that it came in October 2016, was almost certainly made to prevent news of the alleged affair from influencing the election. A separate payment was made in August to acquire the rights to former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s story about her alleged affair with Trump. Prosecutors have argued that because Cohen was involved in campaign matters, the payments — which the SDNY wrote on Friday were made with “the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election” — constituted campaign contributions. “Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments,” the filing read. “In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.”

“Individual-1” is, of course, Donald Trump, and directing Cohen to make the illegal payments to Daniels and McDougal for the purposes of influencing the election would indeed constitute a felony, regardless of how inconvenient this may be for the president. This goes without mentioning a host of other unknown crimes investigators could be attempting to tie to the president. Contrary to Trump’s tweets Monday morning, these investigators prying into the president’s various pre-election dealings are not “Dems.” As George Conway, the attorney and husband of Trump counsel Kellyanne Conway, pointed out on Twitter, “the criminal campaign-finance violations were found by professional line prosecutors in a Republican-controlled United States Department of Justice.” Conway added that “it looks like a pretty good case.”

The strength of this case has led to renewed calls for Trump’s impeachment. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Sunday that if it is proven that Trump directed Cohen to commit the campaign finance violations in question, it “would be impeachable” and that “even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.” Though Democrats will take over the House of Representatives in January, a majority of Senate Republicans would need to sign off on removing the president from office, which isn’t likely to happen minus one hell of a “smocking gun.”