News Clips

"These statements do the opposite of what he intends," said Paul Ryan, a top lawyer for Common Cause. "They don't prove his innocence. They, in fact, underscore his guilt."

“You have to follow the money and figure out who was in on the decisions and who wasn’t in on the decisions," said Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy for the watchdog group Common Cause. "We don’t have the answers to that. “It sounds like it wasn’t just Donald Trump and Michael Cohen sitting in a room together.”

Manafort’s conviction increases the need for Congress to protect Mueller’s investigation from White House interference, said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the Common Cause, a government watchdog group. "Justice must be allowed to run its course through the Special Counsel’s investigation," she said. "Americans expect Congress to put country before party and exercise its oversight responsibilities to allow the full truth to be unearthed and shared with the nation."

“The simple fact that a sitting president is implicated is pretty astounding and something we haven’t seen in decades, if ever,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, a Washington-based group that had filed a complaint with the Justice Department about the payments.

“We’re talking potential years of jail time if he’s not the sitting president but was instead a civilian candidate,” said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, which filed campaign finance complaints based on the payments made to the women connected to Mr. Trump.

“I just think it again affirms what we filed in our complaint; that it sounds like Donald Trump knew about the hush money payment to McDougal before the election,” said Common Cause Chief of Strategy and External Affairs Stephen Spaulding. “I just think this is more of another log on the fire that these are campaign finance violations and that the thread continues to unravel.”