Trump lawyer: Michael Cohen's not going to go be someone's wife in prison given the "racial overtone"

A grim soundbite for more than one reason but I can’t help but laugh at his logic. Is the idea that Cohen might be okay with being a jailhouse “wife” if he could be sent to an all-white prison?

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Maybe POTUS could lean on the U.S. Attorney to make that happen for him, for old times’ sake.

By the way, this is the same attorney who told the media yesterday that he thinks Cohen is destined to roll over on Trump — although he clarified in this interview with Erin Burnett that he doesn’t mean to suggest that Trump has done anything criminal. What he’s worried about, he claims, is Cohen giving the feds false information about POTUS to try to swing a lighter sentence. (Alan Dershowitz says he’s worried about that too.) Which is to say, he sure seems to believe that Cohen might be guilty of something. Just not Trump.

A different lawyer who’s been in the news lately also thinks Cohen will be negotiating a plea soon:

Avenatti is now alleging that he has evidence of bank fraud involving Michael Cohen, which he has almost certainly shared with the F.B.I. And the F.B.I. may soon respond in kind: “We expect to have access to at least some of what was seized at some point in the near future,” he added. (The Department of Justice declined comment.) And what might that yield? Avenatti’s preferred scenario is that it would cough up proof that Trump not only knew about Cohen’s payments to Daniels and other women, but compensated Cohen from campaign funds. But he believes the true smoking gun is a so-called Suspicious Activities Report (S.A.R.) reportedly created by the Treasury Department earlier this year after a bank is reported to have flagged Cohen’s account for dubious transactions. (The Treasury Department and First Republic Bank did not provide a comment to The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, while Cohen called it “fake news.”) “That is a critical document at this juncture of the case,” said Avenatti. If such a report existed it could very well describe a narrative of events in which monies were moved from bank account to bank account in an effort to cover up campaign payments to Trump’s alleged mistresses. “The importance of that document cannot be overstated,” he said…

Trump has stated publicly that he knows nothing about Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels. But if indeed Trump did know about the Cohen-Daniels transaction, “that could constitute evidence of a felony of federal campaign-finance law, as well as a host of other potential criminal conduct or charges,” said Avenatti. “And then it would be up to the special prosecutor or another prosecutor in law enforcement to bring those charges.”

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Yeah, there are two key questions regarding the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels. One is whether it qualifies as a campaign contribution, i.e. a payment made for the purpose of influencing an election, under federal law. The case for that appears to be strong given the timing of the payment, in late October 2016. The other question is, if there’s a campaign-finance violation here because the payment went unreported, whose violation is it? Did the money really come from Michael Cohen, with Trump none the wiser, or did Trump himself — or his campaign — reimburse Cohen? That’s where the SAR comes in.

Here’s Avenatti in Master Troll mode yesterday on MSNBC. Exit question: Yesterday, in warning the media that he thinks Cohen will flip on Trump, Jay Goldberg also mentioned that he told Trump not to sit for an interview with Bob Mueller. That’s good advice, which every lawyer in America would agree with, but it’s advice given privately by an attorney to his client. That means it’s supposed to be confidential. So what the hell’s Goldberg doing sharing it with the media? Is he trying to destroy the privileged nature of his conversations with POTUS?

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David Strom 12:30 PM | April 23, 2024
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