So, to sum up, Daniels shared the texts, and possibly dick pics, from Trump with four people: her then-boyfriend (now ex-husband), two porn actresses, and one photographer. This was a number of years ago, and I think it’s unlikely that any of them kept the texts/pics. Who wants to carry around pics of Donald Trump’s dick for a decade? But, I’ve been wrong about everything for the past few years, so what do I know?
If they still have the phones, it may be possible to recover deleted texts or images from them. From my experience, the way they delete stuff (copying the contents of a block to a new one, minus the deleted data and marking the old block as unused without zeroing out the bytes) makes the process relatively easy.
True. I’m a computer forensics guy by profession. You can often recover deleted texts and files, depending on various factors. I just assume that everyone involved has gotten new phones a few times since the originals were sent, and probably lost all traces of the originals at some point. But again I’m just guessing.
Recovering deleted files in that way depends on the files not having been overwritten afterwards. The sooner you try to recover them, the more likely it is, but after years, it’d be a long shot, especially if these people are often receiving texts containing images.
From what I can find, on average people replaced phones every year and a half back then. And deleted data does tend to hang around longer than you’d think. Due to the copy-on-write/delete behavior, you can actually have many copies of a single text if you look at a dump of the memory. All those blocks would have to get reused before it’s truly gone. I’ve seen more than twice the advertised capacity of text messages recovered from a phone of a similar vintage. This is assuming that the messages were even deleted in the first place.
Given that, and as I’m someone who still has all his cell phones, I choose to believe it’s more likely than not that texts from Trump to Stormy Daniels still exist.
I think there’s another take here that demonstrated how incapable trump is at understanding people. He thinks he can use an attorney to bully anyone simply because he can afford to remain in the litigation cycle far longer than anyone else. Along comes someone who isn’t in the same financial position trump’s other victims are in. She wants attention and fame, not money. She gets that with trump bullying her, and trump is too stupid to change his tactics. This is absolutely the best reversal of tactics ever against trump. He’s the big tank that can’t lower his gun far enough to shoot the little tank nipping at his heels.
It should be noted that they weren’t following Mr. Hart, but Ms. Rice based on a “tip” from her “roommate”. (I always thought that one smelled a bit. (The situation, not the roommate.))
Michael Cohen used a Trump.org email address to arrange payments to Stormy.
In addition, Stormy’s then-attorney addressed correspondence to Cohen as Cohen "in his capacity at the Trump Organization and as “Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump”, literally addressing Cohen as Trump’s lawyer.
ETA: it also appears Cohen used this Trump.org email to actually conduct the negotiations. Winning!
Which “this”? Having the affair with a porn star, or covering it up, or using his lawyer to cover it up for him out of his own pocket, or breaking the deal once he’d made it, or trying to sue her for his breach of the deal?
I think the larger point is that the President of the United States is easily, quite easily, blackmailable and was, in fact, literally blackmailed by a mere prostitute a month prior to the election.
Seeing this, is it more or less difficult to imagine Vlad Putin having something blackmailable on Trump?
Insofar as it’s not a surprise to anyone that he’s an adulterous sleaze, okay, I’d agree that the affair itself is really not that big of a deal. However, paying off a porn star so she doesn’t disclose an affair before an election is a big deal. The fact that it appears to have been structured in a super-sketchy way to evade or outright break campaign finance laws is an even bigger one.
Seriously, you don’t see this as something the president of the United States could be blackmailed on? You don’t see that as a problem? He and his people obviously wanted it covered up.
For men like Trump, it’s all about bragging rights. Ol’ Billy Bush isn’t going to be impressed if Don says “I banged a blonde with big boobs,” but WILL be impressed if it’s “I banged Stormy Daniels.”
(Men like Trump aren’t quite heterosexual–what really matters to them is not the sex with women; what really matters is impressing other men.)
Yep. Might even improve his image, with many of his fans.
I’m not even sure the vaunted ‘pee tape’ would be any sort of problem for him, since it involves female prostitutes–Trump’s fans would watch it then go on to fantasize about their hero having sex with each of the women (even if that didn’t happen, they’d assume it did).
The only sexual activity that could lose him fans is activity with another male, I suspect.