Today in two courtrooms hundreds of miles apart, Donald Trump wasn’t physically present, yet what happened could have a major impact on him and his future. In Alexandria, Virginia a jury found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on 8 counts. Almost simultaneously Michael Cohen was in a New York courtroom pleaded guilty to several charges. The White House is staying silent on both cases.

While Sanders isn’t talking about either case Trump did briefly address the Manafort verdict.

Trump wouldn’t answer questions about the stunning news out of another courtroom. Michael Cohen implicated Trump while striking his plea deal. CNN says, “Cohen said in a plea deal that ‘in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office’ he kept information that would have been harmful to the candidate and the campaign from becoming public.”

It’s hard to spin what happened today as anything but bad for the President.

CNN also points out:

“Lawrence M. Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission and a CNN contributor, said that Michael Cohen’s plea marks the first time in nearly 50 years that a US President has been accused of being a part of a campaign finance crime.”

This New Yorker article written by Adam Davidson is a must read. Here’s an excerpt:

“Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.”