For the Record

TV lawyers keep fretting about how key witness Michael Cohen is a noted liar—he's even got a felony conviction for it—so juries might have trouble believing him. I don't know, if it's a "he-said-he-said" between him and Trump and he's explaining the deceit Trump was paying him to practice...

Also, the only important Cohen lie in this case is the one COVERING UP FOR TRUMP in his guilty plea, when he claimed he'd made an illegal campaign contribution (the Stormy payment), hiding the fact that Trump had reimbursed him (as Cohen proved in 2019 with the canceled checks).

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 16, 2024 at 9:34 PM

(cite from Politico in August 2018 www.politico.com/story/2018/0...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 16, 2024 at 9:41 PM

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THERE WAS CONNIVING

Via Taylor Marsh.

From the foreword to Michael Cohen's Disloyal, publisher and issue date as yet unrevealed:

Both sides were wrong. I knew that the reality was much more complicated and dangerous. Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors. I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything—and I mean anything—to “win” has always been his business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of President Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, “there’s no Russian collusion, I have no dealings with Russia…there’s no Russia.” 

I really need to know what this means. I've long thought the collusion wasn't very formal, neither side quite knowing what the other was going to be getting up to (cf. Roger Stone trying to squeeze information out of WikiLeaks), and kind of haphazard, but does Cohen mean all that? What is "connivance"? 

It's more than "dealing" over the Trump Tower Moscow site, it's about the 2016 election and the cheating, and Trump's desire to "win" in scare quotes, and I think it's got to be more than the general press is expecting, but it's also something Mueller and Cummings (for the House Oversight Committee) and especially Schiff didn't think to ask him about?

For the Record: Baron von Troomp and the Mysteries of Authorship

Image via Express, August 2017. The book, from 1893, is real.

A funny word usage of Trump's on the Twitter this morning went toward answering a question Jordan has asked—Steve and I figured out a boringly rational explanation of why Trump believes he himself wrote The Art of the Deal and other books published under his name:

Aside from everything else, Donald thinks books originate as "transcripts" https://t.co/4a7zXBoKPo

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Right. And he has no idea how much work Schwarz had to do with it after the interviews, because he hasn't read it.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Ghostwriters probably gave him copies of their interview transcripts before they started the actual writing, and he gave these to the lawyers tasked with making sure he hadn't said anything that would get him in trouble and washed his hands of them, and felt his work was done. Obviously a man of his responsibilities can't sit down and type the thing, or whatever it is they do, but he's very confident that he authored it.

Whose lies are they, anyway?

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters, via The New Yorker.

Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the State Supreme Court for lying & fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time. Using Crooked’s lawyer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2019

This time it’s different🙄 https://t.co/KmFbYC2k80

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 27, 2019

It's remarkable that these people keep working to discredit Cohen's testimony by reminding us of the crimes Cohen pleaded guilty to—"He's a convicted liar so why should we believe him now?"—as if nobody had any way of finding out what he was lying about when he told the lies for which he's going to jail, or on whose behalf:

Vicinity of Prague

Bohemian forest retreat, by Uhlik Architekti.

Very startled by this story from McClatchy that seems to corroborate one of the key details of the Steele memos, according to which

A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

Which is consistent with two of Steele's most startling reports, in BooMan's paraphrase, placing Cohen somewhere around Prague at that point

Literary Corner: Rhyme

Great Liability

by Donald J. Trump

I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law.
He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know
the law. It is called “advice of counsel,” and
a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made.
      That is why they get paid.

Despite that many campaign finance lawyers have strongly
stated that I did nothing wrong with respect to
campaign finance laws, if they even apply, because
this was not campaign finance. Cohen was guilty
on many charges unrelated to me,
but he pled to two campaign charges
which were not criminal and of which he probably
was not guilty even on a civil basis.

Those charges were just agreed to by him in order
to embarrass the president and get a much reduced
prison sentence, which he did—including the fact
that his family was temporarily let off the hook.
As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me!

They gave General Flynn a great deal
because they were embarrassed by the way
he was treated - the FBI said he didn’t lie
     and they overrode the FBI.

They want to scare everybody into
     making up stories that are not true.

Got paranoia?

From a 1948 Republic movie serial, via Wikipedia.

So I'm watching MSNBC, and no, I'm not apologizing, it's something that happens, and Ali Velshi is asking the FBI counterintelligence veteran Frank Figliuzzi for a little color commentary—where is that tape, of the conversation on the subject of Playmate payoffs between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, physically located? And he says, oh, all those tapes are part of the Southern District US attorney investigation, they're in the New York FBI field office, and a penny drops, like this:

• The Michael Cohen tapes are in the New York FBI field office;
• Rudolph Giuliani, who has replaced Cohen as the president's "lawyer" (meaning that's his title but he's not doing any legal work to justify it, he's mostly going on TV spouting gibberish at certain key moments), is on TV all day talking up this particular tape of the Karen MacDougal conversation as offering "powerful exculpatory evidence" for his imperial highness, which I won't bother to try refuting because "I really don't care do u?";
• the lead story on TV would otherwise certainly be how DNI Dan Coats broke up into appalled laughter when informed in real time that Trump had invited President Putin to the White House for more of the summitry that went so well for him on Monday.

When I first started hearing the story of the MacDougal tape around midday, my immediate response was to fire off a reproach to a wingnut darkly talking about leaks from the Mueller inquiry:

It's been leaked by Trump's lawyer, you fool. It shows him not agreeing to make payments.

— Dreams and Yaspirations (@Yastreblyansky) July 20, 2018

I wanted to delete that, because it seemed obviously wrong: how could Trump's lawyer or Trump's "lawyer" as the case may be have access to the audio taken by the FBI from Cohen's office and apartment and hotel room?

But it now looks as if there's a very simple answer to that question, and one that involves the same guys as the ones who trapped James Comey into revealing the "investigation" of the Huma Abedin laptop for Halloween 2016, still collaborating with Rudy. Those boys are up to their old tricks again! Working the refs, and making the conversation about something other than Putin while waiting for that conversation to subside. You read it here first.

Oh, and I could have been right the first time, because per #Maddow this tape is one of the 3 out of a million documents in the Cohen collection that actually was considered protected as a matter of attorney-client privilege, and the president's lawyers received it directly from Cohen's.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

For the Record: Trump's Very Bad Day

And in case you didn't get a chance to notice,

#BREAKING: The victims of Donald Trump’s fraudulent university will finally receive the relief they deserve. A federal court just finalized our $25M Trump University settlement. pic.twitter.com/mBSJwgIY8i

— Eric Schneiderman (@AGSchneiderman) April 9, 2018

I didn't realize that was still pending in any way. "Your so-called lawyer got his office, apartment, and the hotel room he was staying in while his apartment was getting renoavated all raided by FBI agents looking for evidence of crimes of illegal campaign finance contributions, wire fraud, bank fraud, and by the way you need to write a check for $25 million to pay off all those people you defrauded back in 2010. Have another cheeseburger!"

Then there was this explosion quoted at TPM indicating that he's heard how the soybean and hog farmers feel about his trade war plans:

Stormy Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Barbara Stanwyck in Alfred Santell's Breakfast for Two (1937).

The brethren on the "Sure Trump is awful but he's not a criminal like Hillary" right have had an easy time as you'd expect deciding that "he fucked her and lied about it to the American people" is a triviality after all and they're mystified as to why anybody should care about it—

People didn't vote for Trump because of his marriage fidelity. No one cares. https://t.co/j5wZjMLfVZ

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) March 25, 2018

—but cannot comprehend that we don't care about it either, any more than we did when Bill Clinton was president, beyond the sheer fun and Trumpery of it; I especially liked the detail that the rolled-up magazine she spanked him with was not Forbes but Trump, and the scene as Stormy narrated it could just about have been played by Barbara Stanwyck: