None of the liberals calling for Trump’s head know what he’s accused of, they just know he did it. They don’t remember how the previous accusations ended or even what they were, despite having taken the strongest of positions; and here they are, again, taking the strongest position on the one issue they want you to know they care about: Donald Trump is Guilty.
So that’s the Manhattan jury pool. Almost all of them read the New York Times so it’s no wonder. But to be fair, no one else knows what Trump’s accused of, either. Not the lawyers, not the pundits nor the people they interview. Three weeks in, no one on either side or on the outside knows what the crime is. I heard a Politico reporter tell Brian Lehrer that a prosecutor doesn’t have to say what the charges are, but can figure them out as he goes. Lehrer affected that this made perfect sense to him, and I think they’re right: Alvin Bragg himself doesn’t know what the charges are.
I asked my mom, a reliable barometer for MSM messaging, to explain the crime in Trump’s “hush money” payments, and she said it’s the cover-up. “That’s what an NDA is, Mom. An contract to pay someone not to talk.”
“But Trump covered that up,” she said. “During an election.”
She thinks of the hush money as the crime and the cover-up, but simultaneously, thinks the crime is the cover-up of the hush money. In other words, she tracks Bragg’s case perfectly. Michael Cohen paying Stormy Daniels and billing Trump for reimbursement could only have been directed by Trump as an illegal scheme to conceal the NDA.
The problem with that theory is that for the cover-up to be criminal, the act being concealed must also be; but NDA’s are legal, routinely-made agreements, especially in N.Y. Knowing this, N.Y. prosecutors cobbled together a tiny Frankenstein of expired misdemeanors from different jurisdictions and brought them back to life by alleging they were done to interfere in elections, to create 34 felonies of a class no neutral judge would accept, which appear to be accounting decisions, and hurl them at a defendant who doesn’t do his own accounting.
Never mind that the U.S. Attorney’s Office and FEC both declined the election case, and that Bragg, being a local D.A., has no jurisdiction. Never mind that without this federal crime which the feds deemed wasn’t a crime, the underlying charges are expired. Never mind the prosecution’s testimony violating the collateral evidence rule. Never mind the judge’s family generating income from his rulings.
Ignoring these serious problems, the prosecution must not only prove that Trump ordered Daniels’ “hush” payment to be structured in the way it was, but that he did so deliberately to conceal some other law that he broke, and further that he broke that law to influence the 2016 election and not to protect his marriage, family, or reputation.
With Daniels, as with Karen McDougal, the payment scheme had another layer. David Pecker at the National Inquirer paid McDougal for her story and didn’t publish it. Pecker testified he did the same for Schwarzenegger when he ran for California governor and Rahm Emanuel when running for Chicago mayor. But somehow it became a crime when it benefited Trump.
not reimburse Pecker for McDougal, hence only being charged for Daniels. Whether or not that played a role, Pecker did not buy Daniels’ story and Cohen couldn’t convince Trump to, even with Daniels ready to cancel and go public with ABC. As Michael Avenatti told CNN, “ ‘It’s absolutely laughable’ that Trump was not aware of attempts by Cohen to pay Daniels.”
On Day Nine of the Trial, Daniels’ lawyer for the NDA, Keith Davidson, testified on Cohen missing deadlines to finalize it: “It was clear, Cohen didn’t have the authority to spend money. Finally, he said, ‘I’ll just do it myself.’”
“So let me get this straight,” Avenatti tweeted. “Cohen now claims he borrowed $130k on his house and pays interest on it in order to give that same $130k (on behalf of a billionaire) to a woman who according to him was lying.”
It can be inferred from Trump’s apparent refusal to pay that the allegation was a lie, as Cohen said, or otherwise nonthreatening. Trump didn’t want to make the deal (nor did he make it), but Cohen did — in fact, in Davidson’s testimony he sounded desperate to.
Clearly threatened by Cohen with a lawsuit, One America News retracted and apologized for a March 27 story they’d covered with the Gateway Pundit of a self-described intelligence contractor, Tony Seragus, who tweeted that he’d shared a Newport Beach office building with Avenatti where Avenatti told him Cohen himself had slept with Daniels starting in 2006, and Cohen had hatched the hush money scheme to extort Trump.
Now if you look at Daniels’ original 2011 tell-all interview, the supposed affair with Trump is almost an afterthought. She devoted few words to it and gave no idiosyncratic details: the deed was done in a normal way and didn’t happen again, despite her likewise unverifiable claim that Trump called her for years afterward from a blocked number. She named Ben Roethlisberger as a witness to them not having sex the next time they met. So by the looks of things, she didn’t expect this to go to court. She wanted the settlement.
Viva Frei thinks “it looks like Cohen might have been involved in a fabricate-to-get-paid scheme, where he would find a scandal” and arrange to cover it up. Robert Barnes elaborates, “here’s the problem with ‘fixers’: they often have to create problems that they say they fixed for you, that often are not problems, for you.” He then lists the reasons Daniels is not Trump’s type, suggesting she was not a problem, for Trump — which matches up with Trump not paying. But Cohen really wanted to fix it, didn’t he?
Barnes thinks Cohen “definitely” had relations with Daniels. If so, that could be how Cohen found the problem to fix. Why else would he take a loan on his own house to lend the borrowed money to a billionaire? Is it possible that Daniels extorted him originally and they made a deal to extort Trump? Remember, she and McDougal each approached the Inquirer with the same lawyer, Keith Davidson.
Davidson has been sued for extortion by Hulk Hogan, Tila Tequila, Charlie Sheen, and Robert Herjavek of Shark Tank. When The Smoking Gun wrote their profile on him, Davidson was fighting three extortion lawsuits at the same time and allegedly attempted to extort the reporter.
Davidson brought the women to Pecker, who we’re told published negative stories about Trump’s opponents but “caught and killed” stories about Trump, because he wanted Trump to win.
Barnes continues: “Pecker was involved in his own extortion scheme. That’s really what he admitted to on the stand. The scam was, go and buy up stories that could embarrass someone, and then get them to pay you. He’s pretending it was always the other way around. Let’s just assume it wasn’t.”
Image: PickPik
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