Stormey Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti might be the most famous lawyer in the world right now for actually being a lawyer, rather than being a head of government or a criminal suspect.
Today Avenatti is apparently the mastermind behind the release of jaw-dropping financial records that suggest Michael Cohen has been, to put it mildly, up to no good.
The thing is that I’m starting to lose track of how Avenatti is serving Stormy Daniels. I think he’s wonderful and I hope his act servces to bring down the hideous traitors in Trump’s circle, but I am not exactly sure how all this serves Avenatti’s job of representing Stormy Daniels. What will Daniels get out of Michael Cohen being arrested?
I put this in GD because I expect there to be debate but I’m honestly asking the question.
Fundamentally, Stormy Daniels says that what she wants is to be released from her NDA so she can talk about her relationship with Donald. Avenatti’s continually turning up the heat on Donald & Cohen should - theoretically - make them more eager to just scrap the NDA. Theoretically, there’s a point where the fallout from whatever Daniels would say is less bad than the fallout from the repeated revelations about Cohen and Donald’s shenanigans. It’s sort of amazing that we haven’t hit that theoretical point.
At the point we’re at now, even if Cohen & Donald prevail in upholding the NDA, send it to arbitration, and Daniels gets fined however many stupid dollars it would be - all of this info about Cohen’s possible pay-to-play scandal with Russian oligarchs and ATT is still in the public domain.
I’m actually kind of terrified that Donald & Cohen will agree to release Daniels and that will be the end of it. Avenatti talks like a man who thinks that will never happen.
Trump is playing a losing game and everyone knows it. It is physically impossible for him to NOT lie and he is easily baited into making mistakes. Avenatti has openly told Trump his strategy and Trump is STILL not able to control himself, tell the truth and not incriminate himself.
How would such a moron NOT be the ideal opponent in a lawsuit?
You don’t think embarrassing a megalomaniacal fraud in public and beating him from pillar to post in front of the entire world wouldn’t satisfy a guy who is himself described as an egomaniac?
He’ll make plenty from other clients. But it is clear that Avenatti hates Cohen’s guts - and Trump too. And I bet he is convinced, probably correctly, that Cohen hired the goon who threatened Stormy in front of her daughter. So that might have something to do with it.
It could be all those things. But my money is on the money. And just to be clear, I’m not trying to paint him as some slime-ball. He’s taking advantage of the cards that were dealt him. When the fates throw a straight flush your way, you go with it!
OK, let’s say his intentions are admirable, in the sense of patriotic, civic-minded. Then he should have found another route to have them be public. Absitively, posolutely, this shit should be dragged out into the sunlight, but he was not the right person to do it. Hard to imagine anyone wronger.
Also, I very much doubt he has anything Mueller doesn’t already have. If he did, well, maybe that might be different. But he could still have copied the documents and dropped a copy to a news org. Wait a few days, nothing happens, drop another set to a different org. Hell, maybe send the first set to Fox, just for shits and giggles…
The Treasury IG has opened an investigation into the leak of Cohen’s financial records to Avenatti. Not sure if that will hurt the investigation of Cohen, but it certainly won’t help.
I’m also not seeing how Avenatti’s latest revelation advances the cause of getting Daniels out of the NDA or finding the person who allegedly threatened her. However, the underlying reason Daniels wanted to be released from the NDA was so that she could go public with her story, which is presumably damaging to Trump. It seems to me that she was always motivated ultimately by a desire to give Trump a black eye (out of personal or political grievance, I don’t know). My guess is that Avenatti signed up for this at first because he likes attention, likes lawyering, and dislikes Trump. Then at some point Daniels and Avenatti realized that they could give Trump even more and bigger black eyes with the material they were turning up.
Avenatti is a showboat and probably a egomaniac. But he seems to be a good lawyer; he’s rich; and he likes adrenaline (he also races cars). Sounds like just the kind of guy that would like to be the guy to take down the President of the United States. For her part, Daniels once said in a news conference (paraphrasing) “taking on bullies is kind of my thing”. She’s taking on the world’s biggest bully while behaving in a much more mature and responsible way than he is. I speculate that she is enjoying this opportunity to legitimize sex work along with kneecapping Trump.
I don’t think either of them cares much about the NDA at this point. I think they both now see themselves as Making History. Which they are.
His intentions are to promote himself. Which is true of most people in public life. Which is not to be taken a binary comparison against him in favor of Trump/Cohen or saying ‘they both do it’ (whatever ‘it’ is). Just saying there’s no reason to believe Avenatti is doing any of this for ‘civic minded’ or even pure political* motives. It’s to become a bigger figure in the legal world. But it’s like in Adam Smith to some degree, we don’t get our bread and beer from the selflessness of the baker and brewer but rather from their self interest. Except as you imply, judgment calls on the more marginal of Avenatti’s claims and revelations** might be tilted against them in some cased because of his apparent motives where they wouldn’t be if somebody with more claim (though it’s never absolute) to obejctivity were making them.
*ie what’s ‘civic minded’ if you’re from a certain part of the political spectrum but the other side of the spectrum doesn’t think is, so the other side of the political spectrum must be just inherently non ‘civic minded’ :rolleyes:
** here’s an example not necessarily that Avenatti is pushing but in major media
A Korean firm paid Cohen for $150k consulting work and it’s ‘poised’ (though actually a lot less certain the Lockheed-KAI team wins that contract than the article implies AFAIK) to win a $16bil contract decided in the bowels of the DoD bureaucracy by people who odds on don’t think much of Trump (even if conservative leaning, lots don’t). I think you have to have a pre-existing agenda to think that’s a huge revelation (could still be sleazy on a small scale, no question). And the eagerness to puff it up detracts from the credibility of those reporting it. If it was something bigger and more clear cut, it wouldn’t matter as much the messenger.