This porn star lawyer is gonna take down the President of the United States. Turns out it takes sleaze to kill sleaze. Ha ha!
I’m thinking about starting a crowdfunded project to erect a monument for them if/when the time comes.
He’s just a good businessman!
Fascinating stuff at TPM tonight on the possible source of Avenatti’s information.
Banks – especially big banks at the branch level – have senior execs whose main job is to look for and flag suspicious transactions, which requires a report in a certain format that is filed with the bank, and also typically with law enforcement jurisdictions who might have interest, whether that’s at the local, state, or federal level.
Anyway, one of TPM’s readers has that job for a big bank, and he looked through the document dump Avenatti produced, and saw that everything had the typical format of those reports, which are known as Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs.
And based on that…and based on Avenatti tonight on CNN defending his ubiquitousness on TV by saying “It’s working, people are giving us information,” the bet is that somewhere a bank financial officer leaked this info to Avenatti, because apparently one of the original corroborating sources for the WSJ report that uncovered the original Stormy Daniels stuff was…an SAR on Michael Cohen. The thought is that someone turned over to Avenatti a whole lot of SARs on Cohen, and that is where Avenatti got that level of detail, and also the “There’s more…” stuff.
Because they are hypocrites.
BTW, a couple of other things that stand out here.
-
Creating an LLC is Delaware is cheap. I mean like, it costs maybe a few hundred, depending on if you need some off the shelf legal help with the paperwork.
-
Donald Trump has dozens of LLCs, for what I assume are bog standard legitimate purposes.
-
If there’s no link to the payments made to Essential Consultants LLC and the Stormy Daniels payout (and I’m not saying there’s a link), then why on earth would Michael Cohen use that same LLC for a corporate dark money slush fund? Which brings us to…
-
If you are stupid enough to use your porn star payout LLC as your dark money slush fund LLC, why in the name of fuck would you escalate and go to war with the porn star who received a payout from that LLC? I mean, aren’t you thinking “Oh shit, all of this could be exposed in discovery in a lawsuit” at minimum???
I mean, it’s crazy easy to imagine how all this shit happened. “Hey, we need some kind of vehicle to run this money through that we’re going to be receiving, Michael.”
“Oh, no worries, I’ll just use that LLC I created last month.”
Also, today I learned: Michael Avenatti is a graduate of Parkway Central High School in St. Louis County.
I’m so proud of my camera-hogging, ambulance chasing homey.
Not if you got your law degree from the worst school in the country!
I mean, this is shit where Lionel Hutz would be like “Dude, don’t do that.”
Really cool info. Thanks for all of this.
How did it turn it that Avanatti found out about all this?
TPM speculating – and it seems right based on Avenatti’s comments – that someone leaked him as many as 4 SARs relating to Cohen’s activity on the bank account belonging to Essential Consultants LLC.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-how-avenatti-found-out
This raises the question of whether there was a new shell corporation set up.
Very much so, and people who claim knowledge of how Trump and Cohen and their circle work say “Oh hell yes there are more.”
But that’s speculation at this point, informed though it may be.
Also, there’s almost no way that Avenatti doesn’t end up as a Milkshake Duck in all this, right?
Que?.
It’s a twitter-originated term that is totally needed as for this day and age. It’s someone or something that appears really positive at first and which people love, and then when you find out more about it later on, you realize “Ewwww.”
Like Ken Bone, the red sweater guy from the 2016 debates, everyone loved the dude, and then people dug up a bunch of really awful stuff on his instagram. Milkshake Duck.
Eric Schneiderman, the NY AG who resigned yesterday: Milkshake Duck.
Just feels like we’re days or weeks away from finding out that Avenatti eats babies.
Ah, ok. I’ve been educated, thanks.
I know all this stuff is fascinating to us, but if the info came from SARs, then it seems incredibly likely Mueller has had this info for ages, yes? In fact, it seems likely that those payments were part of the justification for the surveillance/search warrants.