Trump Spells “Infidelity” with Two Ds

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen reportedly attempted to apologize to the president’s wife, Melania Trump, over the $130,000 hush payment he made to cover up his client’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.

Cohen, who is under a federal investigation related to such payments and documents who many now suspect may flip on the president, approached and tried to say sorry to the first lady earlier this year at a GOP fundraiser held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, The New York Times reported Friday.
[…]
The Times story did not detail what, if any, response the first lady had to Cohen at the time.

The first lady has been silent on the alleged affair, even as additional details have emerged. She also has appeared to distance herself from her husband on multiple occasions, canceling her appearances to his events or arriving on her own.

A spokeswoman for Melania Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Newsweek on Friday.

It’s not so much the payment that needs apologising for as the infidelity.

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President Trump just went on Fox and Friends, and in a shouting, idiotic, rambling interview admitted that Michael Cohen represented him in the Stormy Daniels affair. Something he’d, you know, denied knowing anything about up until now.

The dumbest man alive.

It complicates things from all kinds of angles… potentially makes it less likely that the judge will allow a stay, since it increases things like the public interest aspect of the ruling.

I’m waiting for all of this hugely damning stuff to finally actually mean something besides “gotcha” moments in the media. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of career-ending moments for Trump and yet here we are.

This isn’t really that sort of moment, sorry.

This is more of a damning procedural thing, because when it is coupled with Cohen’s plan to invoke the 5th in his SDNY deposition, it further paints both Cohen and Trump into a corner.

Cohen and his lawyers can no longer assert that communication between Trump and Cohen during the campaign was not related to legal representation, and thus not germane to any investigation of either man.

But, by planning to plead the 5th in SDNY, it also creates a reasonable implication that perhaps something untoward occurred, that perhaps a law was broken, in by Cohen, Trump, or those two together, when Cohen represented Trump. And so it also removes the argument of attorney client privilege, since that is not covered in cases of fraud.

Finally, it gives Mueller yet another alley he has to investigate. Was the President party to felony election fraud?

You know, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. Listening to that phone call, Trump - who is never particularly articulate to start with - flips through verb tenses a lot there, which blurs the meaning into un-parsable nonsense.

He says “[Cohen] represents me in this crazy Story Daniels thing”, which I took to mean that Cohen is involved in the arbitration hearings. You could argue that technically the arbitration is between Daniels and “Essential Consulting LLC” and not Trump, so he’s admitting his involvement… but it still involves Trump’s name.

Later in the same run-on sentence he flips to the past tense and says “[Cohen] represented me…” which certainly implies that he represented Trump with Daniels in the past. But Trump can barely string a dependent clause together, much less keep verb tenses straight.

I just don’t think there’s much of anything here. Sanders will come out and say that what Trump said was not what people are saying he said. And I think she might be mostly right in this case.

Has he said that? I know he told the CA court that regarding the civil suit. So hard to keep up…

Filed it as his intention to do so with the Judge yesterday.

SDNY is literally already using Trump’s interview from… what, a couple hours ago?

“Based on the advice of counsel, I will assert my 5th Amendment rights in connection with all proceedings in this case due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York,” Cohen wrote in the filing in Los Angeles federal court.

I don’t think he has said anything about taking the 5th in the criminal case. He hasn’t even been charged with anything yet.

If he’s not a party to the contract, why would he need/be allowed representation?

Yes, know. Which is what I said:

He is invoking the 5th in the ongoing SDNY investigation, presumably in any deposition that might be forthcoming. (You, uh, don’t need the Fifth Amendment’s protections if they’re, you know, not asking you questions under an oath; when they do ask you questions under an oath, that is, by any other name, a deposition.)

Well, so it’s not the nothingburger Tin Wisdom says it is.

Here. Decide for yourself whether this is clear or not.

The question and quote:

Doocy: “How much of your legal work was handled by Michael Cohen?”

Trump: “Well, as a percentage of my overall legal work, a tiny, tiny little fraction. But Michael would represent me on some things. He represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me. And from what I see, he did absolutely nothing wrong. There were no campaign funds going into this, which would’ve been a problem.”

I mean, damn. Trump:

  1. Admits that Cohen represented him in the “crazy Stormy Daniels deal,” and

  2. Admits that he knew that if campaign funds were used, that was “a problem” (reasonable assumption: “not allowed” or even “illegal”)