Stormy Daniels has a "Monica Lewinsky" dress

[onekidanddone]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 Dumbo just tweeted the sketch to make sure all his followers see it.

D'oh!

So he just admitted the threat was real. Rut Row 

[Howl]

On 4/8/2018 at 4:49 PM, fraurosena said:

Ugh. Am I the only one who's getting a little tired of Avenatti hyping up every little detail?

Haven't gotten tired of him yet, because he uses his brilliant PR and legal strategies to play both Trump and Cohen and expose them for the sleazeballs that they truly are.  With each appearance, he's beating Trump and Cohen at their own game. 

He has weaponized TV interviews and twitter to expose Trump as a pathetic philanderer, Cohen as an inept and feckless 45th-rate lawyer and kept his client in the news, while emphasizing WHY she's in the news. 

I'd say Avenatti has also set himself up for a second career as a TV legal analyst. 

So, no, he doesn't bother me and I look forward to him continuing to skewer Cohen and Trump.  Jake Tapper referred to him as Nostradamus for his (mostly accurate) predictions. 

However, I clearly understand how YMMV.  There are other guests on talking head shows that I don't care for. 

 

[onekidanddone]

Yea, I suppose this is true

 

[onekidanddone]

Does this mean we have to wait 90 days to see twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one?

Judge puts Stormy Daniels case on hold for 90 days, citing likelihood Michael Cohen will be indicted

Quote

 

A federal judge on Friday granted Michael Cohen’s request for a delay in a lawsuit brought against him by porn star Stormy Daniels, saying it appeared likely Cohen will be indicted in a related criminal investigation.

Judge S. James Otero’s order for a 90-day stay comes two days after Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California. Cohen’s declaration cited the investigation by federal prosecutors in New York, who are examining his role in quashing embarrassing stories about Trump during the 2016 campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Otero said Friday that the issues in the civil dispute with Daniels overlap with the criminal probe into Cohen. The lawyer’s Manhattan office and home were raided on April 9.

“This is no simple criminal investigation; it is an investigation into the personal attorney of a sitting President regarding documents that might be subject to the attorney client privilege,” Otero wrote. “Whether or not an indictment is forthcoming, and the Court thinks it likely based on these facts alone, these unique circumstances counsel in favor of stay.”

Daniels’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, said he planned to file an appeal early next week.

“While we certainly respect Judge Otero’s 90-day stay order based on Mr. Cohen’s pleading of the 5th, we do not agree with it,” he wrote on Twitter.

Cohen’s attorney, Brent Blakely, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Daniels, who says she had an affair with Trump  more than a decade ago, is seeking to void a deal she reached with Cohen days before the election under which she was paid $130,000 in exchange for her silence. Cohen has said he “facilitated” the payment using his own money from a home-equity line of credit.

Trump, who previously denied knowing anything about the $130,000 arranged by Cohen, acknowledged Cohen’s efforts on Thursday for the first time.

“Michael represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “And from what I’ve seen, he did absolutely nothing wrong. There were no campaign funds going into this.”

Daniels’s suit, filed last month, named the president and Essential Consultants, a limited liability company Cohen created as a vehicle for the payment, as defendants. Daniels later added Cohen as a defendant.

It is not uncommon for defendants facing both civil liability and criminal prosecution to request a pause in civil proceedings to avoid giving sworn testimony and producing documents that could prove incriminating.

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

On the bright side, if the case drags on we will continue to see Avenatti on the talking head panels and he's kinda hot.

[Cartmann99]

26 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

On the bright side, if the case drags on we will continue to see Avenatti on the talking head panels and he's kinda hot.

Plus, you know that Trump records all of Avenatti's television appearances to watch while screaming and throwing fast food at the television. 

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

On the bright side, if the case drags on we will continue to see Avenatti on the talking head panels and he's kinda hot.

Meh. He's a bit too... smooth for my liking. And way too full of himself. 

 

[onekidanddone]

6 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Plus, you know that Trump records all of Avenatti's television appearances to watch while screaming and throwing fast food at the television. 

 

Trump maybe thinking that dragging this out 90 days will get people to forget and move on to other distractions. True as that might be, 90 days from now is that much closer to the midterms when this case will pop up it's ugly little head again. Double entendre not intended, but I'll leave it there.

[Smoochie]

11 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Meh. He's a bit too... smooth for my liking. And way too full of himself. 

 

I don't disagree, but ... he's been right so far, pretty much about everything and my inner 10 year old boy kinda likes he doesn't hesitate to jab Trump with his own bullshit.  

[Howl]

1 hour ago, Smoochie said:

my inner 10 year old boy kinda likes he doesn't hesitate to jab Trump with his own bullshit. 

DH mentioned today that Avenatti is one of the few people to fearlessly beat Trump at his own game by not backing down and using Twitter as a beat down. Trump has always depended on threats of legal action to intimidate; now that's being turned on him. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

This WaPo article shoots holes the size of mountains in Giuliani's claim that there was no campaign finance violation, and even makes the case for criminal offences.

Trump repaying the Stormy Daniels money doesn’t mean there were no campaign finance violations

Quote

It didn’t take former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani long to make his mark after joining President Trump’s legal team. Unfortunately, the mark Giuliani left was on his client.

During an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Giuliani volunteered a startling bit of information. That $130,000 that Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen admitted having paid to porn star Stormy Daniels? Trump had repaid it.

“That money was not campaign money, sorry. I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know,” Giuliani said to Hannity, raising the subject on his own. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation.”

It’s not entirely clear what Giuliani is claiming happened. Over the course of the interview, he told Hannity that Trump repaid Cohen through a monthly $35,000 retainer over a series of months “when he was doing no work for the president,” an amount that Giuliani said included “a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael.” Later, he speculated that the money might have been paid out of “law firm funds.” Regardless, Giuliani said, it didn’t matter for legal purposes.

According to Lawrence Noble, senior director and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, that’s true: How the payment was made doesn’t affect the legality.

There was still almost certainly a campaign finance violation.

“We still have the same question: What was the purpose of this,” Noble said when we spoke by phone Wednesday evening. We’ve noted in the past that the question of whether the payment was meant to aid Trump’s candidacy is central to campaign finance considerations — and that it’s hard to argue that this payment wasn’t related to the campaign.

“If the purpose of this was to stop [Daniels] from hurting the campaign,” Noble continued, “then what you have is Cohen made a loan to the campaign. And it was an excessive loan because lending the campaign money is a contribution. It was an excessive contribution until it’s repaid.”

Trump, he said, can make contributions of any size to his own campaign. (Giuliani alluded to this, too.) But the campaign can’t just take loans of any size from anyone without reporting them as long as Trump pays them back later. If that were legal, there would be no point in having campaign finance laws: Candidates could accept giant loans, not report them, and pay them back after the election had ended. (The Wall Street Journal reports that the repayment occurred after the campaign.) By not reporting a loan from Cohen meant to aid the election of Donald Trump, the campaign would have violated the law. Had Cohen not been repaid, the violation was his own, as an agent of the campaign making a contribution to it of that size.

When asked by reporters, Trump claimed not to be familiar with the payment to Daniels. Had Giuliani argued that Trump repaid Cohen only after he learned about it, it might bolster the argument that the payment had nothing to do with the campaign, Noble said. But Giuliani himself said that the repayment took place over months in the form of a payment for services not rendered.

What’s more, even if the loan didn’t have anything to do with the campaign — again, a questionable premise — Trump may have had to report the loan on his ethics forms as a federal officeholder.

Update: In an interview with The Post’s Robert Costa, Giuliani seems to imply that the payment was campaign-related. “I don’t know if he distinguished [the payment] from other things Cohen might have done for him during the campaign,” Giuliani said.

All of that aside, there’s another issue. We learned from NBC in March that Cohen had finalized the payment to Daniels from his Trump Organization email address. In other words, he used corporate resources to engineer a contribution to Trump’s campaign — violating a prohibition against corporations “facilitating the making of contributions to candidates or political committees.”

It gets worse.

“Giuliani suggesting it was funneled through the firm as legal fees,” Noble said, “is evidence of an intent to hide the source, which could make it knowing and willful, which is criminal.” There could also be tax violations, he added.

There’s admittedly a vagueness to Giuliani’s assertions. At one point he claims that Trump “didn’t know the specifics” of the Daniels payment, perhaps giving Trump a bit of cover after the president denied knowing about it at all.

But to Giuliani’s central thesis — that the repayment meant that no campaign finance laws were broken — the law is fairly clear. If Cohen loaned Trump $130,000 by making the payment to Stormy Daniels so that her story wouldn’t come out before the election, that loan would have had to have been reported.

And it would have been reported before Election Day.

 

[AmazonGrace]

All I can think of is they know the investigators got the goods from Cohen and all this would come out anyway and they wanted to get ahead of the story before Maggie Haberman publishes it.

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love the newest spin by Rudy -- the payment was just to "protect" Dumpy's family. Suuuure.

Spoiler

President Trump’s new lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani sought Friday to clean up a series of comments made during a whirlwind media tour meant to bolster the president’s standing regarding a payment to a porn star but that instead created new problems for his client.

In a statement issued hours after Trump told reporters Giuliani was still getting up to speed on the facts, the former New York mayor said that a $130,000 payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels by longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen would have happened regardless of whether Trump was on the presidential ballot the following month.

“The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family,” Giuliani said in the statement. “It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”

On Wednesday, Giuliani revealed that the president had reimbursed Cohen for the settlement Cohen paid in October 2016 to keep Daniels from disclosing details of a sexual encounter she alleged she had with Trump a decade earlier.

Giuliani has said that the details of the reimbursement showed that Trump paid back Cohen because it was a personal, not a campaign expense. But campaign finance law experts said Giuliani’s remarks did not rule out violations of campaign finance laws, and some of his statements may have actually provided new evidence for investigators.

Appearing Thursday on the Fox News Channel, for instance, Giuliani asked viewers to imagine if Daniels had aired her allegations “on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.”

“Cohen didn’t even ask,” Giuliani told viewers. “Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”

In his statement, Giuliani also sought to make clear that he speaking in television interviews about his understanding of events in which Trump had been involved and not about what the president knew at the time. The distinction is important because if Giuliani publicly described a private conversation with the president, he might have inadvertently waived attorney-client privilege on that conversation, potentially opening the door for prosecutors to probe further into what was said.

One close Trump adviser said Giuliani had “waived the privilege big time” with his appearance on “Fox & Friends” and description of his conversations with his client, the president.

This adviser, who requested anonymnity to speak more candidly, said Giuliani’s misstatement came because he relied on Trump’s description of what happened, without independently researching the nature of the payments.

“Rudy followed the client’s wishes without knowing all the facts,” the person said.

Giuliani also stated that it was “undisputed” that Trump had the constitutional power to fire former FBI director James B. Comey, which he did last year. Trump’s action is among those under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Muller III as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation,” Giuliani said.

In saying that Trump had the power to Comey, Giuliani appeared to be backing away from an assertion he made earlier this week that the president acted out of frustration that Comey wouldn’t publicly state that the president was not under investigation by the FBI.

That earlier statement raised concerns among some legal experts who said Giuliani seemed to say Comey was fired over the Russia investigation – and such an admission could further an obstruction of justice probe involving the president.

Cohen is under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations, according to people familiar with the matter. FBI agents searched Cohen’s house, office, and hotel room.

In early April, after Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was unaware of the settlement that Cohen had paid to Daniels.

Since Giuliani began discussing these matters publicly two days ago, the White House has been besieged with questions about their past denials of the president’s knowledge, and on Friday morning, Trump suggested Giuliani had misspoken.

“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago, but he really has his heart into it, he’s working hard, he’s learning the subject matter,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to leave the White House.

“He knows it’s a witch hunt,” Trump continued. “He’ll get his facts straight.”

Trump talked to reporters again Friday after taking a helicopter from the White House to Joint Base Andrews and before departing to Dallas, where he is addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association Friday afternoon.

“Rudy’s great,” Trump said there. adding: “He wasn’t totally familiar with everything.”

On Thursday morning, Trump issued a trio of carefully worded tweets, largely echoing the points Giuliani had made in his Wednesday night interview.

In a brief telephone interview later Friday, Giuliani said the episode has not hurt his standing with Trump.

“He says he loves me,” Giuliani said, calling the issue a matter of “interpretation.”

On the campaign trail, Trump saw Giuliani as a loyal surrogate – and the two men even watched sports together riding back from events.

But Giuliani and Trump have never been close friends, associates say, and Giuliani was upset by his treatment during the transition – when he was passed over for secretary of state by Trump’s eventual choice of businessman Rex Tillerson.

Over recent months, Giuliani has occasionally spoken to the president but has not been in his coterie of close advisers.

Trump also said Friday that if he could be treated fairly he would “love to speak” to federal prosecutors investigating ties between his campaign and Russia. He said he would do so even over the objections of his lawyers — if he could be convinced the Russia probe is not a “witch hunt.”

“I would love to speak. I would love to go,” Trump said. “Nothing I want to do more, because we did nothing wrong.”

But, he added, “I have to find that we’re going to be treated fairly. ... Right now, it’s a pure witch hunt.”

Those comments come as Trump’s lawyers are continuing to negotiate with special Muller about the conditions of a possible interview.

Trump and his lawyers have said in recent days that they fear Mueller is trying to trap Trump into committing perjury during an extended interview. Mueller has suggested Trump could be subpoenaed if he doesn’t voluntarily talk.

Trump also complained that there are too many “angry Democrats” on Mueller’s team. He did not mention that Mueller himself is a Republican.

“Why aren’t we having Republican people doing what these Democratic people are doing?” Trump asked.

Senior White House staffer were caught off guard Wednesday by Giuliani's first appearance on Fox News when he disclosed that Trump had repaid Daniels. White House press secretary told reporters on Thursday that she had not learned about the repayment until seeing Giuliani on television that night.

On Friday, a person close to the White House said Giuliani was still not consulting with White House counsel Donald McGahn nor Emmet Flood, the White House attorney recently hired to handle the Russia investigation.

The person, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, said it is possible that Giuliani had a strategy in mind but that it wasn’t clear.

On Friday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who ran President Trump’s campaign in its closing months, said that she was not aware at the time that Cohen made the $130,000 payment.

“I had never heard about that during the campaign,” Conway told reporters at the White House. “I was the campaign manager. A lot crossed my desk.”

 

[Howl]

As mentioned earlier, Avenatti is continuing the relentless application of  pressure, with the WH defaulting to the clown car approach to governance. With Giuliani now in the mix, what could possibly go wrong?

That's not a rhetorical question anymore.  The WH is making incredibly stupid mistakes with real world consequences. 

Avenatti's end game is to end the Trump presidency.  Hubris? Time will tell. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

On 5/4/2018 at 2:05 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

I love the newest spin by Rudy -- the payment was just to "protect" Dumpy's family. Suuuure.

I know, right.  The whole family values thing is just so.....touching. I'm verklempt. 

[AmazonGrace]

Avenatti is brewing some more drama 

s

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]