FBI raids Michael Cohen's office

[onekidanddone]

Just as long as enough Xanax is saved for me. I'm needing a lot of it these days

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Cybersecurity 202: Trump associates may need a lesson on how to use their encrypted apps"

Spoiler

For the second time this month, federal prosecutors say they’ve obtained a trove of encrypted messages from one of President Trump’s former top associates. 

The relative ease with which investigators appear to have accessed the messages of Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen highlights an often overlooked reality: encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp are only as secure as users choose to make them. 

That’s becoming increasingly clear as Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trumpworld’s possible connections to Russia has ensnared Cohen (via a referral to the New York FBI) and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, now in jail for alleged witness tampering in his fraud and money laundering case. 

Prosecutors in New York revealed Friday that they got their hands on more than 700 pages of WhatsApp and Signal messages and call logs from Cohen, who is facing multiple federal investigations. In court filings, they said FBI agents extracted them from one of his BlackBerry phones seized in a search this year. The move comes less than two weeks after prosecutors with Mueller's investigation said they recovered a batch of WhatsApp and Telegram chats from Manafort. A judge on Friday jailed Manafort based on the contents of those chats.  

Cohen and Manafort are both finding out the hard way that while WhatsApp, Signal and others offer high levels of security, their exchanges can remain vulnerable to prying eyes if users don't take steps to enable the full protections. 

And investigators are making hay of conversations Trump associates clearly believed would be more secure but were actually easily foiled. The apps’ end-to-end encryption makes it nearly impossible to read the chats in their encrypted form, but that doesn’t really help shield data from law enforcement if it’s backed up in the cloud or retained on the device. Or, of course, if any one of the message recipients decides to share the exchanges with the feds. 

“Encrypted messaging apps have a very specific purpose,” said Matt Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re designed to make sure that only the endpoints have access to the communications.”

“The thing that these apps aren’t designed to do is to protect your messages from the endpoints themselves,” he said. “If I send you this message through Signal, then you’ll have a copy of it. I will also have a copy of it. If either of us forgets to delete it — or chooses to retain it — then the encryption doesn’t do us very much good. That seems to be most of what’s going on with these cases.”

In Manafort’s case, prosecutors said the recipients of Manafort’s WhatsApp and Telegram messages simply turned over the strings of texts to FBI agents, as I reported recently. Once they had those on hand, they confirmed Manafort was the sender by searching his iCloud account, where some of them were backed up, according to court filings. Manafort appeared to have left enabled a function in WhatsApp that automatically stores chats in the cloud.

In Cohen’s case, investigators seized two BlackBerrys and an iPad during raids on his office, home and hotel room in April, and have been working to extract data from them. 

Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood in a letter Friday that the FBI had managed to pull all the data — 315 megabytes — from one of two BlackBerry phones. They told the judge that the FBI’s original attempt to extract the data “did not capture content related to encrypted messaging applications, such as WhatsApp and Signal,” but that “the FBI has now obtained this material,” which includes 731 pages of messages and call logs. They’re still working on getting the data from the second BlackBerry, according to the letter.

It’s unclear how the FBI accessed this data. But there are several possibilities that don’t involve cracking the encryption.

Like Manafort, Cohen could have been backing up his WhatsApp messages in the cloud, where they would have been accessible with a court order.

Investigators also could have retrieved them from the BlackBerry itself, as Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher noted. “WhatsApp and Signal store their messages in encrypted databases on the device, so an initial dump of the phone would have only provided a cryptographic blob,” Gallagher wrote. “The key is required to decrypt the contents of such a database, and there are tools readily available to access the WhatsApp database on a PC.” Open-source apps such as WhatsApp Viewer allow users to decrypt and read backed-up WhatsApp messages on a desktop computers. 

Whatever the case, the apps’ encryption wouldn’t have put the messages out of investigators’ reach, as Joseph Cox, a reporter for Vice’s Motherboard, pointed out: 

Cybersecurity researcher Matt Tait said the same: 

Green had some fun with the idea of the Trump associate’s false sense of security, too: 

And attorney Michael Avenatti, who represents adult-film star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against Cohen and Trump, took a moment to gloat:

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said investigators in both the Cohen and Manafort cases have a range of tools to access encrypted messages that stop short of the technically challenging and politically fraught work of breaking into a phone. 

“In the Manafort and Cohen cases we’ve seen access to backups and access to seized phones themselves, plus likely other techniques that have not yet been disclosed by law enforcement,” she said. “Security is hard. There are always more ways to break it and usually only one way to get it right, so even without devices, there are software and hardware vulnerabilities and network vulnerabilities that can often be exploited.”

We may continue to see those methods at play in Mueller’s probe into whether Trump campaign officials colluded with Russia in the 2016 election and whether President Trump later attempted to obstruct the investigation. 

As CNBC reported this month, attorneys with the special counsel’s office are asking witnesses to hand over their cellphones to inspect their encrypted messaging programs for conversations among Trump associates. Mueller’s team started collecting the phones as early as April to review private conversations in WhatsApp, Confide, Signal and Dust, according to CNBC. And former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg told New York magazine this month that he recently handed over two or three old BlackBerry phones to Mueller at the request of the special counsel’s office. 

And, as in the Manafort case, potential witnesses collaborating with law enforcement may become even more crucial. “No encryption or other security in the world can protect you from a correspondent who agrees to share your messages with law enforcement,” Cohn said. “This fact shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the government’s options, especially in these high-profile, big conspiracy investigations.”

 

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The Cybersecurity 202: Trump associates may need a lesson on how to use their encrypted apps"

  Hide contents

For the second time this month, federal prosecutors say they’ve obtained a trove of encrypted messages from one of President Trump’s former top associates. 

The relative ease with which investigators appear to have accessed the messages of Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen highlights an often overlooked reality: encrypted apps like Signal and WhatsApp are only as secure as users choose to make them. 

That’s becoming increasingly clear as Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trumpworld’s possible connections to Russia has ensnared Cohen (via a referral to the New York FBI) and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, now in jail for alleged witness tampering in his fraud and money laundering case. 

Prosecutors in New York revealed Friday that they got their hands on more than 700 pages of WhatsApp and Signal messages and call logs from Cohen, who is facing multiple federal investigations. In court filings, they said FBI agents extracted them from one of his BlackBerry phones seized in a search this year. The move comes less than two weeks after prosecutors with Mueller's investigation said they recovered a batch of WhatsApp and Telegram chats from Manafort. A judge on Friday jailed Manafort based on the contents of those chats.  

Cohen and Manafort are both finding out the hard way that while WhatsApp, Signal and others offer high levels of security, their exchanges can remain vulnerable to prying eyes if users don't take steps to enable the full protections. 

And investigators are making hay of conversations Trump associates clearly believed would be more secure but were actually easily foiled. The apps’ end-to-end encryption makes it nearly impossible to read the chats in their encrypted form, but that doesn’t really help shield data from law enforcement if it’s backed up in the cloud or retained on the device. Or, of course, if any one of the message recipients decides to share the exchanges with the feds. 

“Encrypted messaging apps have a very specific purpose,” said Matt Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University. “They’re designed to make sure that only the endpoints have access to the communications.”

“The thing that these apps aren’t designed to do is to protect your messages from the endpoints themselves,” he said. “If I send you this message through Signal, then you’ll have a copy of it. I will also have a copy of it. If either of us forgets to delete it — or chooses to retain it — then the encryption doesn’t do us very much good. That seems to be most of what’s going on with these cases.”

In Manafort’s case, prosecutors said the recipients of Manafort’s WhatsApp and Telegram messages simply turned over the strings of texts to FBI agents, as I reported recently. Once they had those on hand, they confirmed Manafort was the sender by searching his iCloud account, where some of them were backed up, according to court filings. Manafort appeared to have left enabled a function in WhatsApp that automatically stores chats in the cloud.

In Cohen’s case, investigators seized two BlackBerrys and an iPad during raids on his office, home and hotel room in April, and have been working to extract data from them. 

Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood in a letter Friday that the FBI had managed to pull all the data — 315 megabytes — from one of two BlackBerry phones. They told the judge that the FBI’s original attempt to extract the data “did not capture content related to encrypted messaging applications, such as WhatsApp and Signal,” but that “the FBI has now obtained this material,” which includes 731 pages of messages and call logs. They’re still working on getting the data from the second BlackBerry, according to the letter.

It’s unclear how the FBI accessed this data. But there are several possibilities that don’t involve cracking the encryption.

Like Manafort, Cohen could have been backing up his WhatsApp messages in the cloud, where they would have been accessible with a court order.

Investigators also could have retrieved them from the BlackBerry itself, as Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher noted. “WhatsApp and Signal store their messages in encrypted databases on the device, so an initial dump of the phone would have only provided a cryptographic blob,” Gallagher wrote. “The key is required to decrypt the contents of such a database, and there are tools readily available to access the WhatsApp database on a PC.” Open-source apps such as WhatsApp Viewer allow users to decrypt and read backed-up WhatsApp messages on a desktop computers. 

Whatever the case, the apps’ encryption wouldn’t have put the messages out of investigators’ reach, as Joseph Cox, a reporter for Vice’s Motherboard, pointed out: 

Cybersecurity researcher Matt Tait said the same: 

Green had some fun with the idea of the Trump associate’s false sense of security, too: 

And attorney Michael Avenatti, who represents adult-film star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against Cohen and Trump, took a moment to gloat:

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said investigators in both the Cohen and Manafort cases have a range of tools to access encrypted messages that stop short of the technically challenging and politically fraught work of breaking into a phone. 

“In the Manafort and Cohen cases we’ve seen access to backups and access to seized phones themselves, plus likely other techniques that have not yet been disclosed by law enforcement,” she said. “Security is hard. There are always more ways to break it and usually only one way to get it right, so even without devices, there are software and hardware vulnerabilities and network vulnerabilities that can often be exploited.”

We may continue to see those methods at play in Mueller’s probe into whether Trump campaign officials colluded with Russia in the 2016 election and whether President Trump later attempted to obstruct the investigation. 

As CNBC reported this month, attorneys with the special counsel’s office are asking witnesses to hand over their cellphones to inspect their encrypted messaging programs for conversations among Trump associates. Mueller’s team started collecting the phones as early as April to review private conversations in WhatsApp, Confide, Signal and Dust, according to CNBC. And former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg told New York magazine this month that he recently handed over two or three old BlackBerry phones to Mueller at the request of the special counsel’s office. 

And, as in the Manafort case, potential witnesses collaborating with law enforcement may become even more crucial. “No encryption or other security in the world can protect you from a correspondent who agrees to share your messages with law enforcement,” Cohn said. “This fact shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the government’s options, especially in these high-profile, big conspiracy investigations.”

 

Although their stupidity makes me gloat, I wish nobody would report on this just as yet. It only serves to educate anyone else (Javanka, Fredo-dumb and Fredo-dumber, for example) with not-so-encrypted messages that might also serve as evidence. 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Ehhehe.  Michael Cohen may be fine with all manner of criminality but apparently the baby concentration camps were a bit too Nazi for him.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-cohen-resigns-rnc-committee-post/story?id=56033406

 

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime confidant and former personal attorney, has resigned from his post as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee's Finance Committee, sources close to the RNC told ABC News.

In his resignation letter to Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, Cohen cited the ongoing special counsel investigation as one reason for his departure. ABC News has reviewed the email.

“This important role requires the full time attention and dedication of each member. Given the ongoing Mueller and SDNY investigations, that simply is impossible for me to do,” he wrote.

Cohen also criticized the administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, the first time he’s distanced himself from the president.

"As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching,” Cohen wrote. “While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips."

Cohen on Tuesday hired New York lawyer Guy Petrillo to represent him in a federal investigation into his business dealings.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Michael Cohen is getting desperate. President Trump should be worried."

Spoiler

As Donald Trump’s personal fixer, Michael Cohen arranged hush money to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had an affair, and quite possibly other women we haven’t heard of. So now, with the feds breathing down his neck, Cohen seems to be asking a new question: Where’s my hush money?

This is what the Wall Street Journal is reporting:

Michael Cohen has hired New York lawyer Guy Petrillo to represent him in a federal investigation into his business dealings, and has told associates he wants President Donald Trump, his former boss, to pay his legal fees, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Cohen has frequently told associates in recent months he is frustrated that the president hasn’t offered to pay his legal fees, which he has said are “bankrupting” him, according to one of the people. He has said he feels that Mr. Trump owes him after his years of loyalty to the former real-estate developer, whom he served for nearly a decade at the Trump Organization.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment, and there has been no indication Mr. Trump is planning to pay for his former longtime lawyer’s legal fees.

Somebody, whether at Cohen’s behest or not, is sending signals that it might be in President Trump’s best interest to pony up. Here’s what CNN is reporting:

“He knows a lot of things about the President and he’s not averse to talking in the right situation,” one of Cohen’s New York friends who is in touch with him told CNN. “If they want information on Trump, he’s willing to give it.”

The president’s reelection campaign was already paying some of Cohen’s legal bills, but that was only for matters related to the investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. Though Cohen has lots of ties to Russia and Russians living in the United States, he wasn’t all that involved in the campaign itself, other than to occasionally go on television to defend Trump. The real risk for him comes in the investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York; that’s the one who raided his home and office in April, seizing a huge cache of documents, texts and emails, and that’s the one investigating Cohen’s business affairs — which could lead them to Trump’s business affairs.

We always have to keep in mind what an extraordinary step that was; prosecutors wouldn’t have been able to get the warrant for that raid without being able to show probable cause that Cohen could have committed a crime. Of course, it’s possible that all they’ll find is some trivial wrongdoing or none at all. But it’s hard to imagine they’d be going to all this trouble if they didn’t suspect that Cohen had done something very serious. When the raid happened, The Post reported that the president “stewed all afternoon about the warrant to seize Cohen’s records, at times raising his voice.”

Furthermore, the fact that Cohen is so worried about his legal bills suggests that his financial situation is much more tenuous than it has sometimes appeared. It’s has always been difficult to figure out how wealthy a man Cohen actually is; on one hand, he said that he had to tap into a home equity loan in order to pay Stormy Daniels that $130,000 (for which Trump later reimbursed him), but on the other hand, he has been involved in eight-figure real estate deals. For instance, in 2014 he sold four properties to mysterious buyers concealed behind LLCs for a total of $32 million in cash; Cohen had bought the buildings just a few years before for a total of $11 million.

There’s more. On one hand, Cohen built his wealth partly in the taxi business; he owned more than 30 New York taxi medallions, which at one time were worth more than $1 million each. On the other hand, because of competition from Uber and Lyft, the value of medallions has plummeted, and they’ve recently sold for less than $200,000. Cohen may not even be able to get rid of his at more than fire-sale prices. And yet, in the past few years, Cohen and his father-in-law have lent $26 million to another taxi mogul who was looking to get into the legal marijuana business, at least $6 million of which came from Cohen himself.

It’s all very confusing and contradictory. But it certainly seems like at the moment, Cohen is short on cash. And that can make people desperate.

So would Trump actually decide to foot the bill for Cohen’s defense? There are reasons to think he could go either way. Given what we’ve learned about how Trump treated him (“Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said informal Trump adviser Roger Stone), it’s fair to say he thought of Cohen as a vaguely pathetic but frequently useful factotum. But in Trump’s world, loyalty runs one way: from you to him. He doesn’t do people favors out of the goodness of his heart. Furthermore, he sees all these investigations as unfair to him, and the idea that he’d have to give an underling like Cohen hundreds of thousands of dollars would probably irritate him to no end. Today the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that the “Trump family feels like it’s being shaken down.”

Nevertheless, if there’s any legally damaging information to be revealed about Trump’s business dealings, Cohen likely knows as much about it as anyone whose last name isn’t Trump. He could well provide prosecutors with evidence they could use to go after the Trump Organization. If you were the president, wouldn’t that be worth writing a check to forestall?

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"National Enquirer sent stories about Trump to his attorney Michael Cohen before publication, people familiar with the practice say"

Spoiler

During the presidential campaign, National Enquirer executives sent digital copies of the tabloid’s articles and cover images related to Donald Trump and his political opponents to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen in advance of publication, according to three people with knowledge of the matter — an unusual practice that speaks to the close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company.

Although the company strongly denies ever sharing such material before publication, these three individuals say the sharing of material continued after Trump took office.

“Since Trump’s become president and even before, [Pecker] openly just has been willing to turn the magazine and the cover over to the Trump machine,” said one of the people with knowledge of the practice.

During the campaign, “if it was a story specifically about Trump, then it was sent over to Michael, and as long as there were no objections from him, the story could be published,” this person added.

The Enquirer’s alleged sharing of material pre-publication with Trump’s attorney during the campaign highlights the support the tabloid news outlet offered Trump as he ran for president. It also intersects with a subject that federal prosecutors have been investigating since earlier this year: Cohen’s efforts to quash negative stories about Trump during the campaign. As part of that, prosecutors are also looking into whether Cohen broke campaign finance laws, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Earlier this week, federal prosecutors subpoenaed American Media Inc. as part of their investigation into Cohen, according to the Wall Street Journal. A Justice Department official said Pecker did not fall under the regulation that governs when and how prosecutors can obtain records of members of the news media.

“American Media Inc., has, and will continue to, comply with any and all requests that do not jeopardize or violate its protected sources or materials pursuant to our first amendment rights,” AMI spokesman Jon Hammond said.

Pecker declined to be interviewed for this story. Dylan Howard, the company’s chief content officer, called it “completely false” that Trump and Cohen “were told in advance, and copies were shared in advance, and that they had some sort of sway over who the magazine attacked on any given week.”

In an interview last week in AMI’s downtown Manhattan offices, Howard said that if stories were shared, “it was not at the behest of me or David. And quite frankly, if they were shared, I’m a little concerned because people are acting as rogues and renegades.”

“We made a very public endorsement of Trump,” he continued. “So it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for me to commission stories on his opponents given that we had endorsed Donald Trump. And that’s what I did,” Howard said. “I didn’t do that at the behest of candidate Trump or anyone associated with him. I did it because we were chasing good stories.”

Trump “has never been consulted on editorial decisions — or by himself or through intermediaries requested an article be written on a given subject or angled in a certain way,” Howard said. “We do not run or kill stories on the behest of politicians, even if they are the president of the United States.”

Cohen did not return calls or text-messaged requests for comment. The White House referred calls to Trump’s personal counsel, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Once Enquirer editors sent a story or cover image, sometimes a request for changes came back, according to two of the people with knowledge of the relationship. Stories about Trump were positive in nature, and changes related to the stories were not dramatic, according to one person with knowledge of the matter, who said most of the changes in stories sent to Cohen resulted in more flattering cover photos or changes to cover headlines.

Trump suggested stories to Pecker on a regular basis, one of these people said, and had access to certain pieces — including one about Hillary Clinton’s health — before publication.

These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared legal action or professional retribution if they spoke publicly about Trump or AMI, which publishes other celebrity-focused titles including Us Weekly, the Globe and Star.

AMI’s alleged practice of sharing advance copies of articles with Trump and his intermediaries has not been previously reported. The relationship between Trump and Pecker dates back decades, but the communication between Trump, Cohen and Pecker’s publications ramped up during the presidential primaries and the general election in 2016.

According to Sam Nunberg, an early Trump campaign adviser, the Enquirer was Cohen’s “account,” and the relationship with the Enquirer was “a big commodity” in Trump’s circle.

The tabloid “was such a help to Trump during the primary and even the general,” said Nunberg, who compared the weekly to a campaign mailer. Mailers are expensive to produce and send to prospective voters, only a small percentage of whom actually open them.

However, “If you get something on the cover of the National Enquirer,” Nunberg said, “it’s a publication that people pay attention to in the grocery store. You are conveying a message, and it’s free media.”

During the campaign, in addition to stories written about him, Trump was particularly interested in stories about Clinton’s health, two of the people said. They cited two cover stories: the one published in September 2015 that declared she had “SIX MONTHS TO LIVE!” and another a year later that purported to disclose her secret medical file. The cover on the latter issue portrayed Clinton as so pale and aged that she looked, in the words of one former AMI employee, “like a zombie.”

That cover story was sent to Cohen in advance, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Howard denied the story was sent outside AMI and said it was not published to advance the agenda or narrative of a particular candidate. “We merely went where the newsstand dictates,” he said. An analysis of the Enquirer’s newsstand performance showed that covers featuring Trump performed above average and negative stories about Clinton resonated with the Enquirer audience, “just like they have for 20 years,” he said.

Cohen, Pecker and Howard communicated about Trump rivals such as Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and other Republican primary candidates, according to the three knowledgeable people, plus a fourth person aware of the practice. Two of these people cited a story on Carson, a neurosurgeon, about his alleged botched operations as an example of a story Trump suggested to Pecker.

Howard said the story came from legal filings, not Trump. After the story ran, Carson said, “Generally speaking, there is no one who does the number of operations that I did who aren’t going to find some people who are going to be disgruntled.”

The Enquirer had some sway over the news cycle in both the Republican primary and the general election.

During the primary, the paper ran a story on Ted Cruz’s father’s purported link to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; his campaign called it “garbage.” There was also a story about Cruz’s rumored affairs. Cruz attacked that story — of which there was never any evidence — as a plant from the Trump campaign. But Howard said that Enquirer cover on Cruz grew out of a tip from operatives close to Marco Rubio.

Terry Sullivan, Rubio’s former campaign manager, said the notion that Rubio’s camp had circulated the Cruz rumors was “utterly bizarre and 100 percent absurd and not true.”

An FBI raid executed April 8 on Cohen’s office and residences sought all of the lawyer’s records of communications with AMI, Pecker and Howard regarding two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump while he was married, according to three people familiar with the investigation. The search warrant served on Cohen also sought all communications he had with Trump or the Trump campaign about any “negative publicity” that might arise during the presidential race, according to a person familiar with investigators’ work. The warrant sought all his communication about an embarrassing “Access Hollywood” tape that surfaced in October 2016, weeks before the election.

In late 2015, AMI paid $30,000 to a onetime Trump Tower doorman who was offering an embarrassing story about then-candidate Trump. The tabloid said in a statement it never published the claim because of questions about its credibility.

In August 2016, former Playboy model Karen McDougal received a $150,000 payment from AMI for her story alleging a 10-month affair with Trump a decade ago but did not publish the piece — a practice sometimes called “catch and kill.”

McDougal agreed to write fitness columns, pose for AMI covers, and not talk about the relationship with Trump. She recently sued to be released from the agreement, and she and the company have since settled.

Trump-related stories were shared primarily with Cohen, two people familiar with the practice said. After Trump took office, the relationship with Cohen continued, they added, while the Enquirer also started working with new intermediaries.

Richard Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at the University of California at Irvine’s law school, said that coordinating a message with a political candidate only becomes problematic for a media company if the candidate exerts a level of “control” over the outlet.

If a media corporation submits to a candidate’s instructions, “that could amount to a violation of federal election laws,” he said.

Though Cohen was the primary conduit between Trump and National Enquirer reporters, Trump on occasion asked Hope Hicks, his former communications adviser, to call Pecker to suggest a story, said one of the people familiar with AMI practices. Sometimes Trump would call Pecker himself.

“When it comes to Pecker, there didn’t need to be anybody in between,” this person said. “Donald would call David on his cellphone anytime.”

Hicks did not respond to requests seeking comment.

“David’s relationship with Trump was pretty much on a business level,” said Kevin Hyson, chief marketing officer at AMI. Hyson remembered working on a Trump-branded magazine when Pecker was still the CEO of Hachette Filipacchi’s U.S. division. Pecker rented out facilities at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for a couple of board meetings, and Trump introduced Pecker at Pace University when Pecker received an honorary doctorate.

One of the benefits of the Trump relationship for Pecker might simply be access to power. “He likes to say, ‘I just got off the phone with the president,’ ” according to a current associate of Pecker’s.

Not all coverage of Trump is positive in Pecker’s titles. Us Weekly, another AMI publication, has recently run some sympathetic stories about Melania Trump that are implicitly critical of her husband. In one story in late March, in the midst of new publicity around Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who alleges that she had a sexual relationship with Trump, the magazine cited a “family insider” saying that Melania “is very, very unhappy with her life. If she could, she would get away from Donald and just be with her son.”

The Enquirer’s circulation has plummeted from its nearly 900,000 copies a week 10 years ago to fewer than 300,000 for the six months ending Dec. 31, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But AMI officials say that the power of the tabloid is not in copies sold but in its cover images displayed in supermarket checkout lines all over the country.

Trump’s relationship with the Enquirer predates Pecker, but the connection deepened after Pecker took over in 1999. In “The Untold Story: My 20 Years Running the National Enquirer,” Iain Calder, the editor of the Enquirer under a previous owner, wrote of Trump: “The man loves publicity — but only if he controls it. He doesn’t care if reporters write that he is a tough SOB who fires people, but he gets angry if a story implies he is soft-hearted. He’d often call New York reporters, sometimes giving them news tips, sometimes haranguing them about something he didn’t like.

“Of course, we couldn’t let him control the Enquirer’s work, but sometimes we let him influence an angle or delete something that really infuriated him.” Calder, who would not comment beyond what he has written, quotes in his book one of the editors who managed the Enquirer’s relationship with Trump, Larry Haley, saying, “Donald loved having a pipeline into the biggest weekly in America. He loved thinking he could manipulate us, and he knew that, because of our relationship, we would never run a major story without calling him first.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s Michael Cohen problem just keeps looking more ominous"

Spoiler

It was already an ominous week for President Trump when it came to Michael Cohen. And it just became more so.

The Post's Sarah Ellison reported Thursday evening that three sources tell her the National Enquirer shared storied about Trump with Cohen before publication — both during the 2016 campaign and after Trump became president:

During the presidential campaign, National Enquirer executives sent digital copies of the tabloid’s articles and cover images related to Donald Trump and his political opponents to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen in advance of publication, according to three people with knowledge of the matter — an unusual practice that speaks to the close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company.

Although the company strongly denies ever sharing such material before publication, these three individuals say the sharing of material continued after Trump took office.

“Since Trump’s become president and even before, [Pecker] openly just has been willing to turn the magazine and the cover over to the Trump machine,” said one of the people with knowledge of the practice.

During the campaign, “if it was a story specifically about Trump, then it was sent over to Michael, and as long as there were no objections from him, the story could be published,” this person added.

To the casual observer, this may seem like a media ethics story. But it's potentially way more than that.

That's because Trump's control over — and Cohen's involvement in — the Enquirer's and its publisher American Media Inc.'s business is at the center of the probe into Cohen and alleged hush-money payments to Trump's accusers. While Cohen has clearly been implicated in the payment to one adult entertainer who has claimed an affair with Trump, Stormy Daniels, the connection when it comes to another, Karen McDougal, has been much more tenuous.

We also know Trump and AMI head David Pecker are friends. We knew that the Enquirer's parent company paid for Playboy Playmate McDougal's story and then killed it — a so-called “catch-and-kill” practice that some AMI employees have said was either a favor for Trump or leverage to use against him — but we haven't previously seen such a clear indication of a business and editorial relationship between Cohen and AMI. McDougal, in her since-settled lawsuit, accused Cohen of colluding with AMI to silence her, but to this point that has largely been conjecture. AMI employees have also told the New Yorker that they believe Cohen was in close contact with AMI executives as the Enquirer was buying (and not running) another story from a Trump accuser — a doorman named Dino Sajudin who said he had heard about Trump fathering an illegitimate child in the 1980s.

Were Cohen to have this degree of control over the things the Enquirer published during the campaign, it wouldn't be at all difficult to believe it was in cahoots with Cohen on stories that clearly would have impacted Trump's fate — including McDougal and Sajudin. Ellison's source don't appear to have direct knowledge of any such particular machinations, but it's almost impossible to believe Cohen would be apprised of minor stories without having input over potentially major scandals — or at least being given the chance to impact the course of how they were covered.

From there, the question is whether that might have included any financial considerations. Ellison's sources didn't say anything specifically regarding McDougal or Sajudin. But investigators are clearly interested in the relationship between Cohen and AMI, with the Wall Street Journal reporting this week that they have subpoenaed AMI for records related to the McDougal payment. It is believed this pertains to the broadening criminal case against Cohen.

And a number of signals this week suggested Cohen may be interested in flipping on Trump — which is really the big, broader question in all of this. Within a day, the Journal reported Cohen is unhappy Trump isn't footing his legal bills, CNN reported someone close to Cohen as warning Trump that Cohen has a story to tell if he flips, and Cohen also conspicuously distanced himself from Trump's policy of separating families who immigrate illegally while resigning from his position as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee — even though he didn't need to. All of this came after Cohen hired a new lawyer with ties to the same Southern District of New York office with which he would be arranging a deal.

When it comes to his longtime lawyer and personal “fixer,” it's a whole lot of bad signs in a very short period of time for Trump.

 

[Howl]

Did Cohen have an epiphany, an insight into the true nature of his beloved old Boss?  Now that Cohen is on the outside, is Trump beginning to look like a different man?  Like when there's a big messy divorce, and you now burn with hate for the person you used to love, with the power of a million suns?  Is Cohen slowly beginning to understand that business and politics are different? Time will tell, but I don't believe the friendship will survive intact.

A side note: I thought the RNC was paying at least some of Cohen's legal bills. 

[Cartmann99]

I don't know if any of you are following this Tom Arnold business, but in taping episodes for his new television show, he's been meeting with various people connected to Trump.

From the article:

Quote

Arnold would not say whether Cohen was planning to give him any tapes he might have of conversations with Trump.

But he added, "This dude has all the tapes — this dude has everything."

"I say to Michael, 'Guess what? We’re taking Trump down together, and he’s so tired he’s like, 'OK,' and his wife is like, 'OK, f*** Trump,'" Arnold said, laughing.

Later Friday, Arnold tweeted the photo again, seeking to emphasize that it was himself and not Cohen who suggested the takedown.

"Michael has enough Trump on his plate," Arnold said. "I'm the crazy person who said Me & Michael Cohen were teaming up to take down Trump of course. I meant it."

He told NBC News that tweeting the photo was "indiscreet" but said Cohen had been betrayed by Trump after years of loyal service.

"Michael Cohen showed up and worked diligently above and beyond and sacrificed and Donald Trump is like I don’t even know who he is. You think Michael doesn’t notice that?" Arnold said.

It honestly doesn't matter if Cohen told or gave Arnold anything, just the fact that there's proof of Cohen talking to Arnold has got to be rattling Trump.

[fraurosena]

35 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

But he added, "This dude has all the tapes — this dude has everything."

 

This is bigger news than it seems at first sight.

If Arnold's right, and Cohen has all the tapes, if Cohen has everything, guess who's also got access to them now?    

[onekidanddone]

4 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

From the article:

It honestly doesn't matter if Cohen told or gave Arnold anything, just the fact that there's proof of Cohen talking to Arnold has got to be rattling Trump.

In reality all video of Trump is unflattering 

[Cartmann99]

Part two of how to rattle Donald Trump...

 

[Howl]

Did Cohen have an epiphany, an insight into the true nature of his beloved old Boss?  Now that Cohen is on the outside, is Trump beginning to look like a different man?  Like when there's a big messy divorce, and you now burn with hate for the person you used to love, with the power of a million suns?  Is Cohen slowly beginning to understand that business and politics are different? Time will tell, but I don't believe the friendship will survive intact.

A side note: I thought the RNC was paying at least some of Cohen's legal bills. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Botkinetti]

I think Cohen is scared and rightfully so. He has gone from a powerful position to wondering when he is going to jail. He must be suffering from whiplash. 

Trump is distancing himself. He must be hemoraging money to pay legal fees. His reputation as being the “fixer” is in tatters. His life is in a tailspin and he doesn’t know how to stop it. 

No sympathy from me and I don’t believe anything he has to say.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Any possibility that Tom Arnold indulged in a send up of Michael Cohen?  If so, it seems he's committed defamation AND libel. 

I saw Tom Arnold being interviewed by, um, Ari Melber, I think, who was asking Arnold if he had tapes or had heard tapes.  Arnold seemed more than a little unhinged and not particularly coherent.  Drugs? Alcohol?  Meds STAT?

Music swells. Cue Michael Avenatti at any moment to 

1. comment about whether there really are any tapes
2. confirm that he's been hired by Cohen! (a girl can dream)

 

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, Howl said:

Any possibility that Tom Arnold indulged in a send up of Michael Cohen?  If so, it seems he's committed defamation AND libel. 

I saw Tom Arnold being interviewed by, um, Ari Melber, I think, who was asking Arnold if he had tapes or had heard tapes.  Arnold seemed more than a little unhinged and not particularly coherent.  Drugs? Alcohol?  Meds STAT?

Music swells. Cue Michael Avenatti at any moment to 

1. comment about whether there really are any tapes
2. confirm that he's been hired by Cohen! (a girl can dream)

 

 

I saw Laurence O'Donnell interviewing Arnold. He as much as admitted that he has never before heard tapes of the presidunce. He also hemmed and hedged and hinted heavily that Cohen is working with him for his show. And he stated that Cohen is 100% cooperating with prosecutors.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Michael Cohen: Won't anybody pardon me before it's too late. Pretty please?

https://apnews.com/ec556c2583c84532a2daa430d12b78c3/Trump's-former-personal-lawyer-says-he'll-put-family-first?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP
 

Quote

 

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, who once said he would do anything to protect the president, says in an ABC News interview that he now puts “family and country first.”

Michael Cohen also told George Stephanopoulos that he would defer to his new lawyer, Guy Petrillo, if federal prosecutors charge him with anything in their investigation. FBI agents raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room in April as part of a probe into his business dealings.

Cohen added that he is not a “villain of this story” and will “not be a punching bag” as part of anyone’s “defense strategy.”

Cohen was Trump’s longtime fixer and a key player in the Trump Organization. He spoke to Stephanopoulos in an off-camera interview over the weekend and the details were released on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday.

 

 

[Howl]

8 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Just saw this. Hubs DVRs GMA everyday, so we'll watch later this morning.  Cohen will do whatever he has to do to save his future. He has a wife, kids and he'd like to be present in their lives on a daily basis,  rather than speaking on a phone through a glass partition.  

ETA: Can someone bring me up to date -- Is Cohen potentially facing state charges in NY, or just (!) Federal issues currently?

Edited July 2, 2018 by Howl