by Jeff Childers
Late yesterday, the UK Daily Mail ran a story summarizing the tenth day of President Trump’s criminal trial for mischaracterizing legal expenses, headlined “Donald Trump trial LIVE: Ex-president delivers pizzas to the FDNY after claiming he can’t testify because of the gag order.”
As the trial reports trickle out, we begin to perceive a developing prosecutorial disaster. Prosperously shaped prosecutor Alvin Bragg started off with a tepid and flimsy premise. His witnesses are no better: each one some new and more colorful kind of character, and all of them prone to lying and exaggeration. The evidence, if you can call it that, is disorganized and if anything, mostly helpful to the defendant, President Trump.
Prosecutorial star witness and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was called to the stand and immediately wrecked the trial train. Cohen is not exactly your typical lawyer. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and tax evasion and served time in prison. In March, a federal judge refused to terminate his supervised release conditions, after Cohen “accidentally” filed an AI-generated motion citing three made-up cases. He seems much more clever than smart.
Among other peculiar, non-lawyerly aspects of his personality, the jury learned that Cohen had a very bad habit of secretly recording most of his conversations with his clients (and lots of other people), which shatters nearly every rule of ethics on the books. His cell phone was packed with nearly 40,000 contacts, presumably only his very best friends.
The prosecution bookended Cohen’s testimony with that of Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, who might even be a bigger and more disgraceful example of an attorney than Cohen. California attorney Keith Davidson represented the Daniels in 2018, as part of a neat little niche practice he’s developed of representing adult performers, having also lawyered for Playboy “models” Karen McDougal and Shera Bechard. Stormy turned around and sued her lawyer Keith, for allegedly conspiring against her, the client, with the previously-mentioned disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen, which led to Keith’s own bar license being suspended for three months in 2021.
The sordid picture that emerged between the two scheming lawyers’ testimony seems more than anything to help President Trump, who is starting to look more and more like the victim of a con rather than a presidential criminal meriting historic prosecution. For example, one of Cohen’s secret recordings played for the jury this week was a conversation between the lawyers, Cohen and Davidson. In the audio, Cohen whined to Davidson about Trump never understanding why he had to pay for the NDAs:
“I can’t even tell you how many times he (Trump) said to me ‘I hate the fact that we did it,’ and my comment to him was ‘but every person that we’ve spoken to tells you it was the right move.’”
In addition to showing Trump’s obvious distaste toward the whole enterprise, Cohen’s recording also showed a shocking lack of familiarity with ethical rules about keeping the lawyer’s discussions with his client confidential. There was Cohen, blabbing about what he and Trump said, to the lawyer on the other side.
The jury also learned why Cohen flipped on Trump and now hates him so much: bizarrely, the disbarred lawyer expected a political appointment after Trump got elected, even thinking he somehow might become Attorney General. And Cohen thinks Trump stiffed him on the $130,000 NDA payment, which makes the District Attorney’s case even murkier and more confusing, since it seems to suggest that Trump may not have even paid for the NDAs at all.
Lawyer Davidson testified that in December 2016, Michael Cohen called, obviously “very despondent and saddened.” According to Davidson, Cohen “said something to the effect of ‘[Profanity], can you f-ing believe I’m not going to Washington after everything I’ve done for that f-ing guy.”
Davidson also remembered Cohen saying “I can’t believe I’m not going to Washington. I’ve saved that guy’s a** so many times you don’t even know.”
Then Davidson testified that, on the same call, Cohen said “That f-ing guy’s not even paid me the $130,000 back” — meaning the payment to Stormy Daniels that Cohen allegedly advanced.
In other words, one of the reasons Cohen hates Trump so much is because Trump never actually paid for the Stormy Daniels money. This evidence would seem to greatly complicate Alvin Bragg’s case. Good luck proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump ever paid the so-called “hush money” rather than “legal expenses.”
As far as I can tell, things got even better for Trump and worse for Alvin. While he was representing Stormy Daniels in the NDA negotiation in 2018, lawyer Davidson drafted a letter that Daniels signed, denying that here was ever any romantic affair between her and Trump. The prosecutors pressed Davidson to say the statement was false, but Davidson denied it, first seeming to admit that there really was no affair between Trump and Daniels, as Trump has long insisted:
“In the statement, I said Daniels never had a sexual and/or romantic affair with Donald Trump. That could be true.”
So the jury just heard the lawyer who sold Daniels’ NDA to Trump admit that Daniels might have been lying about the affair the whole time. Later, with help from Bragg’s prosecutors, Daniels walked that admission back, but only by engaging in tortured, Clintonesque word-parsing, somehow arguing that the Daniels letter denying the affair could be considered true, but at the same time there was also an affair, because it all depends on how you characterize the relationship.
According to reports, that part of Davidson’s testimony provoked guffaws from the gallery.
But apart from the humor and lawyer hi-jinx, a truly troubling pattern emerged.
Under questioning from Trump’s lawyers, Davidson admitted that he’d approached many other celebrities, and sold them NDA’s like the one he sold to Trump, to keep the unflattering details out of the tabloids and gossip websites. In some cases, even though the pressured celebrities paid for the NDA’s, the details leaked out in various places anyway.
Just like how Stormy Daniels broke her NDA with Trump.
For example, Davidson admitted being involved in deals around actress Lindsey Lohan’s rehab, a sex tape involving TV star Tina Tequila, a Hulk Hogan sex tape, something with boxer Manny Pacquiao, and with actor Charlie Sheen. Trump’s lawyers started using the word ‘extortion’ to describe Davidson’s burgeoning NDA-selling practice (which Davidson strenuously disagreed with).
Of course, this kind of thing absolutely is extortion, and finding out how common it is raises a lot of sympathy for celebrities, politicians, and other people in the public eye. How many crooked lawyers like Davidson are running around scraping up unethical people to invent some kind of barely credible-sounding story defaming a famous person?
Presumably it’s easier for the celebrity to just pay for an NDA, rather than pay a public relations firm to litigate the scandal in the courts and the media, and risk real damage to their public persona. I could see advising someone to take that deal. But it must be extremely frustrating.
Now we can understand why Stormy Daniels only got $130,000 for her story and not a million. It was nuisance money.
The trial is not being broadcast, so all we have to go on is what is reported by people attending in the gallery. But from yesterday’s reports, it seems like the evidence is developing well for the former President. So far, Alvin Bragg only has a creative, novel legal theory about check stubs, a pornographic actress, a crooked tabloid publisher, and a pair of scheming, not-too-smart, extortionist lawyers.
I won’t even try to predict what the jury might do, but this is absolutely not a good look for a trial that is supposed to represent the pinnacle of legal ethics and a historic first presidential prosecution.
Michael Avanetti has offered to testify for Trump and against Michael Cohen.
But there’s a major reason to not invite him as a witness for Trump:
He’s as much a known liar as Cohen is.
The prosecution could make an equivalence between the two.
If Trump likes the testimony of one liar, what’s wrong with the testimony of another liar?
And they’d have a decent point.
Let Cohen fall of his own weight.
He doesn’t need his testimony. Already, the case is clear, cut and dried. Trump’s business is not a public business; it doesn’t matter how he classifies expenses. As long as he isn’t committing tax fraud, it isn’t anyone’s business. Now it seems Cohen made the deal, all the details and Trump didn’t even pay for it.
All that being said, it’s anyone’s guess how the prejudiced jury and judge will act. Truth, justice, due process, attorney/client confidentiality or Constitutional rights have no impact. All that is important is propping up the failed Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden regime.