He’s got his work cut out for him then. Trump’s closets contain enough skeletons to remake Jason and the Argonauts.
He was purposely getting ahead of the story that Trump paid Cohen - it was coming out anyway.
But I can’t see his statement tying the hush money directly to the campaign as anything but a gaffe, unless the taped conversations were extremely detailed. It still seems like continuing to argue that it was a private matter to protect his marriage would have been the desired approach.
Hunter S. Thompson would be about 80 now if he had not taken his own life in 2005. God, how I wish he hadn’t done that. America needs him very badly right now.
Donald’s mere existence doesn’t bode well for their marriage.
I don’t think you could convince a jury that he gives two shits about protecting his marriage.
IANAL but it seems like either way you cut it, its still a campaign finance violation (see here).
I vote it’s deliberate, but keeping in the theme of “Stupid Watergate”, very shortsighted and said with no consideration of beyond this next step.
Like Stormy Daniels’ lawyer said on Morning Joe this morning - “we’re playing 3-d chess, they’re playing tic-tac-toe”.
Indeed, I think it’d be pretty easy to send a parade of women up to the stand. When 30 women testify that they’ve had adulterous relations with the Don, then him pleading “cover-up only to save his marriage” rings a little hollow.
Lord, yes.
That is magnificent!
As usual, IANAL, but I think admitting that Trump was involved might strengthen the defense in Stormy’s lawsuit; if he continued to deny any involvement, they wouldn’t be able to argue as well that the ‘or’ clause applied.
Alan Dershowitz:
“I actually see some overall consistency here. The way I understand what Rudy said, was, look, the president gave this guy a $35,000-a-month retainer. He didn’t earn it. His job was to solve these issues. He had discretion how to do it. He solved the issue by making this payment. The money came out of the retainer that he was paid, the unearned parts of the retainer that he was paid. The president wasn’t told of specific instances of what Cohen had done until he learned about it later. That all is consistent, but it just doesn’t sound consistent when it comes from different sources, each of whom give a little bit of the story.”
Bah. Dershowitz is in the bag for Trump anyway. I wonder how much he’s being paid under the table?
The problem with Dershowitz’s explanation is that Cohen said that he took out a home equity to loan to finance the payment. And complained to others that he was not repaid. Cohen never said anything about using money from his monthly retainer from Trump, which Dershowitz is saying is a perfectly legal thing that Cohen can use to clean up problems. So why would Cohen lie when he could have told the truth about the legal money he had access to use for that very purpose?
NBC has issued a correction, that it was a “pen register” rather than a wiretap.
The best part is that she’s in the picture with a strapping Marine.
I find it entirely credible that Rudy personally debriefed with Donny one-on-one (MOTY to MOTY) and asked what his official position was. And Donny, being a pathological liar and complete idiot, didn’t remember what his previous story(/ies) were and just gave Rudy a rundown of what he believed would be a reasonable “truth” to sell.
Rudy, being an egomaniac with an inflated sense of himself, didn’t bother researching what was already out there from the WH and just ran with what he was told was the “Oval Office’s party line”, not caring that it might (and did) run counter to previous explanations.
A laughable travesty all around.
It’s easy to imagine if he’s not really rich.
Is that a genuine smile? Under all that makeup she might actually be cute.
Of course deliberate. Note that it was prefixed with “I’m about to tell you something that you don’t know” (or something like that). You don’t telegraph an off-the-cuff remark.
But still, even as a deliberate move, everything’s going to shit. First Rudy admits trump paid off Stormy* and lied about it, then contradicts himself the next day and puts Trump in legal jeopardy again. We’re watching his team thrash about in quicksand.
- OK, he said trump knew that cohen “fixed” something, and that cohen does this often enough that trump doesn’t ask questions. Which is something I hope to be true, since Cohen’s home / office have been raided.
Did Rudy actually refer to FBI agents as storm troopers? Didn’t he prosecute people at the federal level in no small part because of the evidence gathered by FBI agents? In my mind, I think that might have been Rudy’s biggest gaffe. Firing McCabe and Comey is one thing; smearing essentially all of federal law enforcement is another.