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FBI raids Michael Cohen's office


AmazonGrace

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Poor, poor Michael Cohen. He has behaved dishonourably and illegally for years and presumably  successfully hid it from his family. Now they know and he can’t hide it any longer. He is sorry , not about anything he did wrong but that he got caught.

If his wife and family did not know about anything I’m sure they are living a nightmare so I do have some sympathy for them.

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I read somewhere that his parents or in-laws own an apartment in Trump Tower and he and his wife co-signed refinancing papers for that property in 2016, giving him access to approximately $750,000.  Such a nice son. /s/

 

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Ruh-roh. It seems things are beginning to come apart at the seams.

 

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Did Avenatti just burn the witch?

 

Edited by AmazonGrace
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4 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Did Avenatti just burn the witch?

Not quite yet, there needs to be a blue wave first for that to happen. But he is holding a burning torch and lighting up all the deep, dark and dirty crevices.

Project Sunlight indeed.

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It looks to me like Cohen also took bribes from ATT. 

 

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Trump went on and on about Hillary's paid speeches, and in the meantime he had this pay for play bribes op going.

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Lemme share with you this TalkingPointsMemo.com  Editor's Blog titled Is This How Avenatti Found Out?  Josh Marshall says, 

Quote

TPM Reader TH thinks he knows where Michael Avenatti got his amazingly specific details. And it sounds right to me …

[TH says] I want to shed some light on tonight’s post re: Cohen/Avenatti, specifically this line:

“They’ve also confirmed the dollar amounts. So while we still don’t know where or how Avenatti got this information he must have had access to one of Cohen’s ledgers, a bank statement or perhaps an investigative document. The details are simply too specific.”

Click on the title link if you'd like to read more and I hope you will.  It's juicy and helps you understand why Avenatti's information if likely rock solid. 

I like this site enough to be a paid subscriber to TPM, and like to send clicks their way.  This particular Editor's Blog (and quite a bit of their content) is not behind the paywall.  The Editor's Blog doesn't have a comments option, but as I may have mentioned before, those commenting about their regular articles are often very well informed,  pretty funny and the comments section is well patrolled to shut down trolls ASAP. 

Edited by Howl
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 Wow dodged a bullet there, so glad Hillary and her pay for play charity aren't The president

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4 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 Wow dodged a bullet there, so glad Hillary and her pay for play charity aren't The president

Trump hires the best shake down artist. The best

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 Mueller is ahead of this, they already talked to Novartis

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"Why do people keep showering cash on Trump lawyer Michael Cohen?"

Spoiler

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former “personal lawyer,” has had a remarkable career, by which I mostly mean that it’s remarkable that he hasn’t gone to jail yet. But the law is catching up to him, which may also mean that it’s catching up to the president.

Last night we got some new and tantalizing news, which I’m going to try to put in context.

I think the best way to understand it is this: When someone does business with Cohen, they may not be doing it for legitimate reasons. If you need a lawyer or some real estate advice and it’s all aboveboard, this is not the man you seek out. If you do, there will almost inevitably be something fishy going on. It might or might not be illegal, but it will definitely be sketchy in one way or another. And there are some interesting people doing business with Cohen.

Last night, Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, went public with the results of an investigation he claimed provided details on transactions to and from Essential Consultants, the shell company Cohen set up in Delaware to pay Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about the affair she says she had with President Trump. You’ll recall that Trump first denied that he knew anything about it, but then his lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted that he reimbursed Cohen for the payoff.

Avenatti’s case has been deemed credible by multiple news organizations. The Post’s Philip Bump summarizes:

On Tuesday, Daniels’s current attorney, Michael Avenatti, released a document detailing a much more complex set of transactions involving the Essential Consultants account with First National Bank. In total, he alleged, more than $4 million passed through the account in 2017 and early this year, including payments from entities associated with major companies such as AT&T and the drug company Novartis. Most explosively, he claimed that Essential Consultants had received $500,000 from a company affiliated with the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Vekselberg had been detained and questioned by federal agents related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe earlier this year. Vekselberg attended Trump’s inauguration, as well as a December 2015 dinner in Moscow that was also attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin and former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.

AT&T and Novartis acknowledged the payments, with the former describing Essential Consultants as being one of a series of firms hired to “provide insights into understanding the new administration.” An attorney for the firm Columbus Nova — the one associated with Vekselberg — told The Washington Post that the payments were for consulting work not related to the Russian or his business, Renova Group.

To my point that when you engage Cohen you’re doing something questionable, let’s begin with AT&T. As it happens, the company was seeking a multibillion-dollar merger with Time Warner that has to be approved by the federal government. Trump opposed the deal as a candidate, and his Justice Department has sued to stop it; the matter is currently before the courts.

AT&T already employs a small army of lawyers and lobbyists, and indeed, the company issued a statement saying Cohen “did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.” So they paid Cohen a few hundred thousand dollars for nothing but his “insights.” Might it be that the company saw dropping a heap of money on Cohen as a way to get an inside track to the president and win his goodwill?

What insights did Novartis want? Its biggest priority is probably to prevent the government from taking any action to reduce drug prices, as Trump has periodically claimed he wants to do. Novartis, which has been questioned about this by Mueller’s team, says it “entered into a one year agreement with Essential Consultants shortly after the election of President Trump focused on U.S. healthcare policy matters,” for which it paid Cohen a remarkable $1.2 million. Ah yes, it was seeking Cohen’s health-care expertise.

Another company, Korea Aerospace Industries Ltd, which is contending for a large Air Force contract, paid Cohen $150,000. It told The Post that “the payments were to provide legal consulting to assist in the company’s reorganization of its ‘internal accounting system’ and did not involve the Air Force deal or other lobbying.” Sure, that’s believable. Why wouldn’t a large foreign corporation hire Trump’s lawyer, who certainly isn’t an accountant, to help it reorganize its accounting system?

And what about the Russian oligarch? What was he seeking from Cohen? Columbus Nova told the Wall Street Journal that it “hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures.”

Boy, there sure are a lot of people eager to acquire Cohen’s brilliant insights.

The most benign interpretation of all this would be that once Trump got elected, Cohen put out the word that if you wanted to make sure the president heard your case on whatever matters you might have before the government, a good way to do it was to slip his “personal lawyer” a six-figure check. This would have been quite foolish on the corporations’ part, since there’s little evidence that Cohen exercises any influence over Trump now, if he ever did. But Cohen may just have been capitalizing on his newfound renown by taking this corporate money for essentially nothing.

In other words, the best interpretation is that while all this money flowing to Cohen was corrupt in its intentions it might not be technically illegal, depending on what was said and done. But this raises all kinds of questions, and now that prosecutors are giving Cohen and his activities a thorough going-over, they’re going to find a heck of a lot more.

For instance, Cohen says he had three legal clients: Donald Trump, Sean Hannity and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor who used Cohen to engineer a $1.6 million payoff to a Playboy model with whom he supposedly had an affair and got pregnant. This story is full of gaping holes, not least of which is the question of why a super-rich guy like Broidy who has used some of the country’s most elite lawyers would turn to a schlub like Cohen to resolve this sensitive situation. Could it be that Broidy — who has his own lucrative matters before the government, and once pleaded guilty to “felony charge of rewarding official misconduct” — was acting as a cutout for the person who really had the affair with the model, a person with a close relationship to Cohen?

Who knows. But we also have to keep in mind that this is likely not the complete story of people sending money to Cohen for any number of reasons. There’s likely a lot more to learn about Michael Cohen’s finances, and some of it may be dirty. We have no idea where that’s all going to intersect with Cohen’s main client.

But to repeat, when you work with Michael Cohen, it’s probably because you’re up to something sketchy. And that applies to Donald Trump, too.

 

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This is the latest filing by Cohen’s lawyers in response to Avenatti’s Project Sunlight document. In it they make some valid points, especially as to how it’s possible Avenatti apparently is in posession of detailed information about personal bank accounts, not only from Michael D. Cohen, but also from two other unrelated people named Michael Cohen. They also ask why he should even be concerned about the information of those transactions as a lawyer for Stormy, as it has no bearing on her case whatsoever.

That said, they’re also attempting to refute some of was Avenatti says with rather dubious arguments. 

The filing also contains the full Project Sunlight document.

 

Edited by fraurosena
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1 hour ago, Myomy said:

At what point do we stop calling Cohen 45's lawyer and start referring to him as his bagman?

Right now! 

Rick Wilson tweet:  [Cohen's] going to flip like a teenage Hungarian gymnast at the 1968 Olympics who knows that if she doesn't get a gold medal her entire family will be sent to the gulag.

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Rolling Stone's Seth Hettena's interview with Michael Avenatti yesterday has answers to some timely questions. Of most interest to me: 

Quote

Getting the obvious question out of the way: How did you get this information that you posted on Twitter yesterday?
Like any good journalist, I'm not divulging my sources. That information is also protected by the work-product privilege.

Are you at all concerned that the White House might use banking regulations to force you to disclose your sources?
Not at this time.

Full text at Michael Avenatti: 'Michael Cohen Actively Solicited These Clients' And more revelations from a new interview with Stormy Daniels' lawyer

So first, and most fascinating, Michael Avenatti is referring to himself as a journalist, which comes with protections from revealing sources.  When he says the information is protected under work-product privilege, is that as a journo or a lawyer?

If anyone is playing three dimensional chess, it's Avenatti.  

Edited by Howl
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11 hours ago, Myomy said:

At what point do we stop calling Cohen 45's lawyer and start referring to him as his bagman?

Ari Melber just referred to Cohen as the bagman and Essential Consultants LLC as the bag!

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This is a good opinion piece: "The GOP is no longer the party of Reagan. It’s the party of Michael Cohen."

Spoiler

The GOP is no longer the Party of Reagan. It’s the Party of Michael Cohen.

Saint Ronald and his acolytes preached that the way to get ahead in the United States was to work hard and never rely on government to help you out.

By contrast, consider the Cohen blueprint for achieving the American Dream: Work minimally, if you can, and leverage government connections whenever possible.

In the months following Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential victory, Cohen cashed in. Advertising his title as the president’s personal lawyer and his continued access to Trump, Cohen told companies that he could provide valuable “insights” into the new administration.

Huge multinational corporations lined up to purchase these “insights,” dumping millions into Essential Consultants LLC, a shell corporation that Cohen had initially set up to funnel money to a porn star.

Companies’ explanations for what they were buying from Cohen vary from the improbable to the ridiculous. Korea Aerospace Industries, a company bidding for a major U.S. defense contract, said that it knew nothing of Essential Consultants’ connection to Trump and was paying him $150,000 for advice on “accounting” practices.

This is despite the fact that Cohen’s previous business experience was primarily in personal-injury law (when he represented clients who had reportedly staged traffic accidents to defraud insurance companies), running a taxi business and scouting Trump licensing deals with sketchy partners across the former Soviet Union.

In other words: not accounting. 

Whatever their stated rationale, these clients certainly appear to have been hoping that Cohen could provide them with access and influence in this administration. But the best-case legal scenario for Cohen and Trump, and one that is actually possible, given their sometimes strained relationship, may be that Cohen collected money for providing . . . no work at all.

That, in fact, is what at least one of Cohen’s clients says happened.

Novartis, the Swiss drugmaker, hired Cohen because it thought he “could advise the company as to how the Trump administration might approach certain US healthcare policy matters, including the Affordable Care Act,” it said in a statement. Novartis agreed to pay Cohen $100,000 a month for this service.

But after its first meeting with Cohen, “Novartis determined that Michael Cohen and Essential Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to US healthcare policy matters and the decision was taken not to engage further.”

And yet Novartis paid him for the duration of the contract — a cool $1.2 million — because it determined that it could terminate only “for cause.” Quoting an unnamed employee, Stat News reported that Novartis continued with the contract because it was afraid of angering Trump if it fired Cohen.

A million bucks for providing zero actual work? Enviable way to lift yourself up by your bootstraps.

Cohen is hardly the only prominent Trumpster invoking White House connections in an effort to make bank.

A year ago, representatives of the Kushner family business — at an event featuring Nicole Kushner Meyer, sister of Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner — implied to Chinese investors that an investment in a Kushner Cos. project, given the company’s connection to the White House, could guarantee a fast track to a green card. Jared Kushner resigned as chief executive of the firm when he joined the administration but continues to have a sizable stake in it.

The Kushners had also sought funding from the Qataris for the company’s massively underwater property at 666 5th Ave. in New York, including while Jared was helping to shape Trump’s Middle East policy. Kushner Cos. had (unsuccessfully) sought funding from a Chinese insurance company with ties to the government for the same struggling flagship building as well.

Cabinet members and other senior government officials, too, have enjoyed a sweetheart apartment deal, lobbyist-arranged vacations and private jet rides.

These are not amenities secured through brains, honesty and hard work, the virtues that Republicans traditionally say are required for upward mobility and financial comfort. They are the fruits of luck, cronyism and a loose approach to ethical lines.

It’s tempting to see all of these unsavory stories as unique to Trump, his extended family or his administration. But in fact they are illustrative of exactly the kind of economy that Trump’s party is intent on creating.

Shielding officials from public scrutiny, rolling back campaign finance law, and kneecapping enforcement of existing laws and regulations designed to protect the public are precisely the conditions that help grifters and swamp monsters thrive.

 

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Good grief. This latest filing in the Cohen case is... quite something, as it is a letter that pertains to two of Eric Schneiderman's alleged victims.  Huh? How so? Isn't this the Cohen case? Yep.

First off, let me say that the letter is really strange, and very revealing at the same time. Strange in the sense that Schneiderman's name is misspelt as Scheinderman, and also strange because the story is just, well, weird. It's revealing in the sense that apparently the writer of the letter is Peter J. Gleason, a lawyer who was contacted by the alleged (anonymous) victims, who was suggested by a retired journalist friend (I told you it was weird) to speak to Donald Trump about it, who in turn just might have spoken to Cohen about it, so now the lawyer wants a protective order on any evidence that Cohen might have had on the alleged victims and their accusations that might have been seized in the raid.

Wut?

Yeah, that was my reaction too. 

 

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