477
Technically not in court but on cable news as her 60 minutes interview airs tonight. There has been a lot of confusion about the importance of her story. After Karen McDougal’s interview with Anderson Cooper the other night-Cooper is evidently the journalist of choice for women who want to tell their story about Trump-some in the media argued that it was not a story of interest except regarding the marriage of Trump and Melania. That at the end of the day this is really an issue for Melania.
Note that in the 1990s the media took the opposite view-they didn’t think that Monica Lewinsky was just a private marital matter. But in any case Stormy Daniels’ story-and Daniels’ paved the road for McDougal and others to come forward-is about a lot more than just sex. Indeed, when the story of Daniels broke a few weeks ago many in the media took the attitude that it was just about extramarital sex and that it was baked into the cake as far as voters were concerned.
From the start I believed this hot take was quite wrong, that what makes this a big deal is the payment; why did Cohen make it? Is it at all credible he did it on his own behalf without Trump’s awareness? And even if so that may well be an in kind donation-or an unethical gift from a lawyer to a client.
The real issues were possible violations of campaign and election law-like a payment to sway an election could be a major problem for both Cohen and Trump. It’s also about pattern: remember the Steele dossier alleged there’s Kompromat on Herr Trump and that he’s subject to blackmail. The Daniel’s case shows how easy it is for him to pay people off-with further questions raised in terms of how aggressively Daniels’ says she was pushed to sign the nondisclosure agreement. And the NDA makes it a major transparency issue-with someone in so-called ‘President Trump’ who already has major transparency issues going back to his refusal to release his tax returns.
UPDATE: In retrospect it’s astonishing how wrong the MSM hot take was-far from being ‘a nothingburger’ or a two day story it led to the S
SDNY investigation of Cohen being indicted and convicted-and sentenced to three years in prison-and Trump becoming an unindicted co-conspirator. That’s literally the opposite of a nothingburger as far from a nothingburger as humanly possible.
“It’s tempting to get swept up in the salacious details of President Donald Trump’s (alleged) sexual antics.”
Like Brett Kavanaugh did in 1999 when he asked Bill Clinton about intimate details about his affair with Lewinsky-the cigar, etc. Of course, this wasn’t only because the now illegitimate ‘Supreme Court Justice’ is perverse pervert-though he is-but also with the purpose of forcing Clinton to either resign on the spot-or lie about it-aka perjury or what the GOP now calls ‘a process crime.’
“The possibility of a sex tape or, God forbid, Trump nudity isn’t actually what matters about his (alleged) extramarital affairs with former adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels, and former model Karen McDougal. Those affairs (allegedly) took place over a decade ago, when Trump was simply a reality TV star. That he may have cheated on his wife isn’t surprising, given what we know about the president.”
Thank you-some people actually have acted surprised that he cheated on Melania. Really?! Do they not know this man’s history? He has always cheated, never saw marriage vows as in any way constraining his sense of being entitled to whatever he wants.
“What’s important here is the way Trump and his circle of enablers went about trying to cover up these (alleged) affairs, while Trump himself was seeking the top political office in the country.”
“Trump’s personal lawyer and his allies at the National Enquirer used nondisclosure agreements to silence these women, taking a page from the corporate playbook.”
“To be clear, Clifford and McDougal both say they had consensual relationships with Trump.”
Sure but other women complained of nonconsensual encounters with Trump-and as I noted in Chapter A, some might consider the encounter Clifford describes with Trump as coercive-in her own words she had sex with someone she didn’t want to.
“He always told me he loved me,” McDougal told Anderson Cooper in a nearly hourlong interview Thursday. Clifford is set to appear in her own interview with Cooper on “60 Minutes” on Sunday.
The NDA is sort of like Trump firing Comey. In the case of the Comey firing the question that begs for those who say that even if Trump DID obstruct justice that doesn’t mean he colluded is: why fire Comey if you’re innocent?
Similarly with the NDA: if there’s ‘nothing to see here’ as much of the MSM initially presumed regarding Stormy Daniels, why the NDA?
“But with Trump, the stakes are even higher. “The entire country pays the cost of not knowing things about the president,” said David Hoffman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in contracts and psychology.”
“Both payouts happened when Trump was the Republican nominee for president and are already the subject of federal complaints for possibly violating election laws.”
NDAs have long since been a major Trump weapon of choice and they raise very thorny issues of transparency:
“Trump’s use of these agreements is even more critical now because he is reportedly wielding NDAs in the White House ― an unprecedented act ― in an attempt to silence his staffers, according to The Washington Post.”
“Most First Amendment lawyers think those agreements would not be enforceable in court. However, the contracts do serve to intimidate and chill speech about public matters ― essentially how the government runs. Stories about the president, from staffers, are critical to understanding history.”
“Donald Trump is acting like he personally owns this information, as though he can act like a king and take any measures to control the way people talk about him,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Minnesota Law School. “You can’t do that when you’re acting with the power of the federal government.”
“The public rarely finds out about NDAs. But thanks to lawsuits filed by McDougal and Clifford, their contracts are now publicly available.”
These agreements are particularly tough to enforce in politics as this will be seen as an attempt to stifle transparency.
“According to legal experts, Trump’s attempt to muzzle private citizens in this way is unprecedented.”
“Trump is sui generis in a lot of ways,” Hoffman said, echoing many of the lawyers who spoke with HuffPost, who agreed Trump is in a class all to himself.
“You just never see this stuff,” he said, referring to NDAs. “It never emerges from the swamp. It was never supposed to be tested in the light of a thousand suns.”
It was simply meant to intimidate Daniels and other women. Now that it’s failed in that regard it’s in a bad place.
UPDATE: Which is why Trump would soon after drop his NDA-as would Cohen.
Overall, Ms. Daniels has conducted herself in a very impressive way-she’s clearly very media savvy and has an excellent lawyer. Indeed, she’s beating Trump who’s allegedly the king of the media game.
FN: Of course over time Avenatti proved himself to be pretty erratic though there’s no doubt that he and Daniels did a good job of getting the story out there-again it led to the SDNY case.
It is certainly interesting to see Trump’s comparative restraint regarding Ms. Daniels-he has NOT called her a liar or insulted her on Twitter or anything. This restraint is, of course, totally out of character. Which might suggest she knows what she’s doing and has a case.
“The White House had denied any sexual encounters ever happened, the president was uncharacteristically silent about Clifford on Twitter, and his other lawyer and perennial fixer, Michael Cohen, had repeatedly denied that his client had anything to do with her. No more: “Mr. Trump intends to pursue his rights to the fullest extent permitted by law,” Harder wrote. By which he meant that Trump intended to seek enforcement of a non-disclosure agreement, to the tune of $20 million, that Cohen had made Clifford sign less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election. In exchange for her silence, Clifford accepted $130,000 from Cohen, who reportedly took out a home-equity loan to execute the payoff. Because who amongst us hasn’t done that at some point.”
This NDA was signed on October 28, 2016-of all days! The day that Comey’s clumsy, indefensible actions handed the election to Herr Trump.
“A cruel irony of this “hush agreement,” as Clifford put it in her own lawsuit seeking to free herself from it, is that it was signed on October 28, 2016 — the same day Comey, in a letter to Congress, may have cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election. The volatility of that political moment lends credence to Clifford’s charge that Cohen, in concert with Trump and his campaign, “aggressively sought to silence Mr. Clifford as part of an effort to avoid her telling her truth, thus helping to ensure he won” the presidency, according to court papers her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, filed in a Los Angeles county court. That opens up another front for the already legally beleaguered Trump: If there’s any truth to this coordination, and the Federal Election Commission substantiates it, the unreported hush money may have well violated campaign finance laws.”
“Cohen, for his part, has insisted that he just did this to help out a longtime client, benefactor, and friend. “People are mistaking this for a thing about the campaign,” Cohen told Vanity Fair this week. “What I did defensively for my personal client, and my friend, is what attorneys do for their high-profile clients. I would have done it in 2006. I would have done it in 2011. I truly care about him and the family — more than just as an employee and an attorney.”
Sure he could have done it at any point in the 10 years between the affair in 2006 and at the height of the election climax right after the release of Hollywood Access and he just happened to do it at the climax of the election. Like Malcolm Nance says coincidences take a lot of planning.
But do friends really take out home-equity loans, create shell companies in Delaware, use fake names, and draw up legally dubious, if not wholly unenforceable, NDAs to force someone else’s silence? For all we know, Cohen could even lose his New York law license for engaging in such shady tactics.”
“The brilliance of Clifford’s legal and public-relations moves, including this Sunday’s long-awaited interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, is that they outmaneuver Trump at every turn — which may explain his own reticence about the whole thing since the Wall Street Journal blew the lid off it in January. In a wide-ranging article exploring the seven-year saga, there’s a fantastic quote attributed to Cohen, whom Clifford is accusing of breaching the hush agreement because he himself confirmed its existence to the press. “I didn’t fucking breach it!” Cohen is said to have yelled, according to the Journal, sounding every bit like any concerned friend would.”
“When all is said and done, Avenatti may even agree, if he hasn’t already, to do this pro bono. The media-friendly lawyer has become a celebrity of sorts since the scandal broke — late on Thursday, he teased his client’s upcoming cable appearance by tweeting out a mysterious image of a CD, as if to suggest that there’s documentary evidence of Trump’s tryst with Stormy. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is this worth?????” Avenatti wrote on Trump’s favorite medium. In a quick call with New York on Friday, Avenatti said Clifford’s 60 Minutes interview will help to dispel many misconceptions about the woman he represents. “I hope the American people will know a lot about my client,” he said. “How smart she is. How comfortable in her own skin she is. And how credible she is.” Unable to bury the story any longer, Trump may even tune in himself.”
You know I will! I’m sure you will too.
UPDATE: Chapter A is a review of her interview.