It Is a Crime’: Jessica Tarlov Reminds Co-Hosts on The Five ‘Donald Trump Was Unindicted Co-Conspirator’ in Michael Cohen Case

Co-host of Fox News’s top-rated program The Five, Jessica Tarlov, swatted down what she called “false information flying around about” the indictment of former President Donald Trump on Friday. She reminded her co-hosts that Trump’s own Department of Justice labeled the then-president an “unindicted coconspirator” in Michael Cohen’s campaign finance violations case.

News broke on Thursday evening that a New York grand jury voted to indict Trump over allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels – the payment which led to Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, going to prison.

“You talk about the rest of the world kind of looking at where we’re at. The El Salvadoran president said this. It’s going to be hard for the US to now lecture us and use arguments about condemning political persecution. So from the outside looking in, Jessica, we now have foreign leaders saying you can’t talk to us about political prosecutions and corruption and that kind of thing because they’re going to point the finger at us and say their impression is that’s what this is,” began guest host Shannon Bream.

“I have nothing against the president of El Salvador. I also know nothing about them. If you have the U.K. prime minister who says something like that, I’d be a little bit more interested in having that conversation,” Tarlov replied, noting the reference was a bit obscure.

“Where it stands right now, and you’re right Shannon to continue to caution everyone on this, is that we don’t know what’s in the indictment. We know that it’s supposed to be 30-plus counts, which I think is not what people expected to begin with,” Tarlov continued, adding:

We also know that there has been months of new testimony since his people like to hearken back and say, well, the DOJ didn’t go with this and the FEC didn’t go with this. There should be new information if there isn’t, shame on Alvin Bragg. And we’ll all be saying that Tuesday at 2:22 [p.m.], because he’s arraigned at 2:15 [p.m]. And I know that the judge is considering unsealing the indictment ahead of time. So maybe that, you know, for your Saturday night, if you don’t want to watch the Final Four, you can do that.

But there is a lot of false information flying around about what’s gone on here. I’ve heard this isn’t a crime. It is a crime. Donald Trump was an unindicted coconspirator in what happened with Michael Cohen, he was not prosecuted because he was president of the United States of America. I went back and I looked at the FEC’s report on this. The general counsel said it explicitly that this was an illegal campaign contribution. So the choice was not to prosecute, not that something was not done that was inappropriate and was a crime. His own DOJ said, “unindicted coconspirator.”

“He was ‘individual number’ one in all of those papers that came out,” Tarlov reminded her co-hosts. Cohen, who was a longtime executive at the Trump organization and the personal lawyer for Donald Trump made a $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

In late 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to making the payments “at the direction” of Trump, which violated tax and campaign finance laws and was allegedly meant to cover up Trump’s extramarital affair with Daniels. He was sentenced to three years in prison.

Tarlov continued, “I’m also hearing a lot about the ‘George Soros-backed DA’ here. George Soros released a statement. He didn’t back out and brag He’s actually never even talked to Alvin Bragg. And I understand that it’s a fun talking point to say that all the liberal DA’s in the country are funded by this boogeyman billionaire.”

“But we all know what happened to George Soros in 2018 when he had a pipe bomb sent to his house by a crazed,” Tarlov continued before the segment devolved into the co-hosts talking over each other.