SAYS WHO
Let's pretend you're Michael Cohen. In the waning days of an apparently doomed presidential campaign, you cut a check out of your HELOC to pay a porn star to keep her mouth shut about an affair with your boss. Through a series of hilarious Russian coincidences, the idiot actually pulls out a win! At which point you find yourself swearing up and down that you alone paid this woman off, out of the goodness of your own heart and without help from the Trump Organization or campaign.
You got 99 problems -- having violated campaign finance laws and legal ethics six ways from Sunday and also drafted the agreement so that Donald Trump has to personally sue to enforce it -- plus you're not even licensed to practice law in California where the suit is going to be argued. You're fighting to keep the Trump Organization out of this litigation, and you need a local attorney to file the arbitration for you. Do you choose:
A) In-house counsel for the Trump Organization; or
B) Literally anyone else on the list of 190,042 attorneys licensed to practice law in the state of California?
Did you say B? Hell, no, you fool! Did you forget that you're Michael Cohen?

Oh, come the fuck on! He hired an attorney whose business address is the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California? Jill Martin's LinkedIn page referred to her as vice president and chief counsel at the Trump Organization until it mysteriously disappeared yesterday when the story broke. She represented the company in the Trump University lawsuits and was dispatched during the campaign to tell American women that Trump could not possibly be a gross, pussygrabbing monster because, "Thousands of women that have worked for him including myself and he's treated us with nothing but respect and appropriately."
How did an attorney from the Trump Organization come to be involved in this litigation when Michael Cohen swears that absolutely no one from the Trump Organization is involved in this litigation? Well! The company cleared it all up in this statement to CNN:
The Trump Organization is not representing anyone and, with the exception of one of its California based attorneys in her individual capacity facilitating the initial filing... the company has had no involvement in the matter.
Yeah, okay, she is a lawyer for Trump's company, and she did file from her business address. But she was filing as an "individual," out of the goodness of her heart. Just like Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime attorney, cut Daniels a check from his own pocket out of unselfish love. And it's just a coincidence that the New York counsel representing Trump in the Daniels suit, LaRocca Hornik Rosen Greenberg & Blaha, also represented the Trump campaign.
You people are BREAKING LEGAL TWITTER with this shit!
Here's Daniels's lawyer Michael Avenatti LOLing to Anderson Cooper about Trump Org's general counsel pretending to be working pro bono to settle her boss's porn star payoff case.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive." - The attorney for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, says new documents suggest a deeper link than previously known between the Trump Organization and the arbitration agreement with his client. https: //t.co/NnVh0bipYW pic.twitter.com/qaQasQhg6O
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) March 15, 2018
Hey, Jill Martin! Hope you didn't draft that Demand for Arbitration using your Trump Org laptop while sitting in your office at Trump's LA Golf Club overlooking the 7th hole. That would be awkward! Don't worry, though. When Michael Avenatti asks you about it in a deposition, just shout SAYS WHO? over and over. It's working out great for your buddy Michael Cohen.
[ WSJ / Arbitration Demand / CNN ]
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damnit, i had a whole WAD of witty ripostes prepared, sigh.
"fucking genius".