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There is a long history of Trump and his friends making threats to people who say things ‘Mr. Trump’ doesn’t like.
The most eye-popping allegations Stormy Daniels made in her 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper Sunday night weren’t about Donald Trump. They were about other figures in Trump’s orbit — an unnamed thug, and a man she believes to be Trump lawyer Michael Cohen — who she says tried to intimidate her out of sharing the truth about her affair with Trump on two separate occasions (in 2011 and 2018, respectively).
I’d like to know where Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, was that night-I’m just saying.
“Even if you believe Daniels is telling the truth about her affair with Trump, it’s reasonable to wonder if she’s not embellishing these incidents at least a little. The approach in a strange parking lot, the B-movie dialogue — it all seems a bit on the nose. And it’s possible she’s making them up entirely, in order to explain why she didn’t go public before now, and why she signed that statement just a few months ago contradicting everything she said on 60 Minutes Sunday night.”
Sure you might wonder that if you didn’t know Trump’s history.
And this isn’t the first time that figures in Trumpworld have been accused of using two-bit intimidation tactics to silence people who had compromising information on Trump. And Cohen’s behavior — both in the past and in response to Daniels — doesn’t exactly make it hard to believe that he could be involved in the incidents as Daniels describes them.
“In 2009, as BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold reported, an attorney named Kristopher Hansen called the FBI and reported that he’d received a threatening phone call from a man he believed to be Donald Trump’s bodyguard.”
Yep-Keith Schiller.
“Hansen represented a group of investors in Trump’s casino company, which was going bankrupt (potentially costing the investors $1.25 billion in defaulted debt). Hansen told the local police department that the caller threatened his wife and children:
My name is Carmine. I don’t know why you’re fucking with Mr. Trump but if you keep fucking with Mr. Trump, we know where you live and we’re going to your house for your wife and kids.
“According to Leopold, the FBI found Hansen’s account credible enough that they gave him a portable recording device and asked him to record any other calls he got. Meanwhile, they traced the number that had shown up on Hansen’s BlackBerry back to a Manhattan phone booth across the street from the theater that hosted The Late Show With David Letterman— on which Trump taped an appearance a few hours after the call was made. (“Three former employees of the show told BuzzFeed News that guests were asked to arrive in advance of the 4:30 taping, though accounts differ on just how far in advance,” Leopold writes.)
Then there’s the astonishing case back in 1995 where a Trump building superintendent states that his wife and child were assaulted and held prisoner after he sent his son to pick up documents showing financial improprieties at Trump properties.
“There’s also a claim of physical intimidation in Trump’s business history. in 1995, a Trump building superintendent and his family sued the Trump Organization for false imprisonment, saying the superintendent’s wife and child were assaulted by Trump security guards. The superintendent said he had information about financial improprieties at Trump buildings, and sent his wife and 12-year-old son to pick up some relevant documents, but the lawsuit claimed the office they were in was broken into with a screwdriver:
Four men prevented Hatixbe Bajrushi and her son from leaving. Matthew Calamari, the hulking head of security, shoved the boy. Trump’s brother-in-law, James Grau, barked questions, demanding to know why they were there. Michael Nicoll, another guard, pushed them back when they tried to leave. Grau snatched her purse and passed it to Calamari, Nicoll, and Domenic Pezzo to rifle through.[…]
Calamari threatened to harm the family if they spoke to police about what happened, according to the lawsuit. After 90 minutes, the police arrived and the Bajrushis were freed.
“None of the security guards named in the lawsuit were charged, although FBI special agents told BuzzFeed News that two of them were questioned as “persons of interest.”
“Because neither of these allegations resulted in criminal charges, much less convictions, they’re not proof of anything. But they bear a resemblance to some aspects of Daniels’s story: the threatening phone calls, the willingness to threaten or harm children. At the very least, they’re evidence that she’s not the first person to accuse Trump surrogates of acting like B-movie thugs.”
Then there’s Trump’s thuggish lawyer or ‘fixer’, Michael Cohen, who’s at the, uh, ‘eye of the Storm’ pun intended with the Stormy Daniels scandal. He made lurid threats against Daily Beast reporters in 2015 for asking for comment about Ivanna Trump’s accusation of rape in the early 1990s.
“In 2015, the Daily Beast’s Tim Mak was reporting a story about Ivana Trump’s allegation that Donald Trump raped her while they were still married in the 1990s. He called Cohen for comment, and after claiming that marital rape wasn’t illegal in New York at the time (it was), Cohen threatened Mak and the Daily Beast:
“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up … for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet … you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added.
“Lawsuit threats from Trump lawyers aren’t unusual, but “What I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting … I’m going to mess your life up” goes beyond a simple lawsuit threat.”
“What’s really interesting is that Cohen hasn’t publicly denied threatening to make Daniels’s life hell in 2018. What he is denying is being involved in sending the thug to intimidate Daniels in 2011 — something Daniels isn’t actually accusing him of.”
“Which is itself pretty interesting: Cohen is angrily defending himself against an accusation she didn’t make-she didn’t say the man that threatened her was Michael Cohen. Indeed, presumably not as she says she didn’t recognize the man and she knows what Cohen looks like.”
“Immediately after the interview aired, Cohen’s lawyer Brent Blakely used much stronger language in a letter to Daniels’s lawyer:
I am writing in connection with the false and defamatory statements you and your client, Stephanie Clifford a.k.a. Stormy Daniels, made on 60 Minutes this evening regarding Mr. Cohen, namely that he was responsible for an alleged thug who supposedly visited Ms. Clifford, while she was with her daughter, and made an alleged threat to Ms. Clifford.
In truth, Mr. Cohen had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any such person or incident, and does not even believe that any such person exists, or that such incident ever occurred.
“But Daniels never said Cohen “was responsible” for the thug. She didn’t mention Cohen in that part of the story at all.”
So here’s the question: why did Cohen assume she was talking about him? Was he in fact involved in the 2011 threat after all-maybe he put up Schiller or whoever it was into making the threat?
So Ms. Daniels’ claim of a physical threat, while not proven as yet, rings all too true:
“Last year, BuzzFeed News reported that in 2009, a lawyer representing investors at risk of losing more than $1 billion in a Trump casino bankruptcy got a frightening phone call from a man who called himself Carmine. If you keep messing “with Mr. Trump,” the caller said, using more pungent language, “we know where you live, and we’re going to your house for your wife and kids.” The F.B.I. found that the call was made from a telephone booth across from the Ed Sullivan Theater, just before Mr. Trump was a guest on the “Late Show With David Letterman” there.
The private investigator Bo Dietl said he had worked over the years for Mr. Trump and that “if someone was targeting Donald on something, and going after him, I would do some confidential investigation for him as far as to deter anybody going after Donald.”
“Mr. Dietl denied any knowledge of the threatening phone call, but, BuzzFeed reported, he referred to “shareholders” in Atlantic City “doing something” and sending a lawyer after Trump. So, Mr. Dietl said, Mr. Trump had him dig up dirt about the lawyer.”
“In 1982, after the New York City housing commissioner, Anthony Gliedman, declined to grant a $20 million tax abatement for Trump Tower, Mr. Gliedman told the New York City police commissioner that he had received a call “threatening his life” over the abatement, according to BuzzFeed. (Mr. Gliedman later went to work for Mr. Trump.)”
So wether or not you want to believe her claim that she was threatened by one of Trump’s thugs in 2009, the pattern is all too clear.
See Chapters A and B for update on Cohen, Stormy Daniels and all that.