Trump Court Thursday: Holy Lindsay Lohan!
Sleazebag lawyer recounts a desperate Michael Cohen.
Happy Thursday, Donald John Trump is back in court, fighting for traditional marriage between a man and his wife, goomar, bareback hookups, fixer, tabloid editor, and their legal teams. It got so wild even Lindsay Lohan and Hulk Hogan came up!
You can catch up with what happened Tuesday here and here.
CATCH UP!
No Eric sightings, he’s probably still trying to buy skin lotion at the Duane Reade, and no family, but fake-elector “legal strategist” Boris Epshteyn made it. He just got indicted in Arizona and is a bit of a groper himself.
Contemptor Contemnor Trump spent his Wednesday away from court riling up his slack-jawed supporters in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and Freeland, Michigan, to boo trans women, low-flow showerheads, and this SOROS BIDEN CROOKED JUDGE FAKE BULLSHIT MARXIST TRIAL. But he did refrain from mentioning the jurors, witnesses and the judge’s daughter, so maybe he’s not so eager to be the Nelson Mandela of poon and shittalk after all.
Trump only dabbled in a little light contempt of his DC case by rambling about witness Cassidy Hutchinson: “These people are crazy. I think she changed her testimony” and "Remember the person that said, I attacked a Secret Service agent in the front of the car? It’s not my deal, I’m a lover, not a fighter.” It was a hip 1982 reference for the youths!
But back to court, four charges of contempt, and it’s Todd Blanche’s time in the blast zone. This sucker gave up partnership for this job, and now his rapist-fraud-former-game-show-host client is already bitching that he’s doing law wrong and costing too much money. For every Trump lawyer, a space under the bus!
Bitching!
The jury was out for the hearing, and prosecutor Christopher Conroy said that while Trump was a menacing, corrosive and infectious little shit, the state doesn’t want the disruption that would come with LOCK HIM UP. Then Blanche blah blahed about political speech and how it should be okay for Trump to say the jury is “95% democrats” because he wasn’t singling anybody out, plus it was nice that he said Pecker was nice, and it’s ugh so unfair Michael Cohen can TikTok every night with Photoshops of sad Trump in an orange jumpsuit — Trump is reportedly triggered at the idea of a jumpsuit — as well as say mean stuff like “he won't send money to President Trump's commissary account in jail” and call him “Vonshitzinpants.”
And Biden can whistle “Stormy Weather,” but poor victim Trump can’t even defend himself by talking about how Stormy has a horseface, wah wah wah, he never gets to do anything fun! Trump made a show of looking around, incredulous at the unfairness.
Judge Juan Merchan didn’t decide anything on contempt just yet, and in came the jury, with scuzzbag lawyer Keith Davidson back on the stand with the prosecution. Soon Trump’s eyes started closing, and Blanche whispered to him, probably to keep him awake.
And now an interview with potential Trump juror Mark DeMuro has dropped, where he says he begged off the case after he was identified and inundated with threatening messages, such as “We know who you are, we know where you are, we are going to come and teach you a lesson.” Free speech!
After the contempt hearing it was time to delve back into the seedy world of Keith Davidson, the go-to lawyer for hushy agreements between stars and the sleazos trying to make a buck off of their secrets.
Davidson testified that Cohen texted him he’d pay Stormy Daniels $130k his own self, and finally, at 4:03 p.m. on October 27, 2016, two weeks before the election, the money finally arrived. He and the National Enquirer’s Dylan Howard cooked up an agreement between Cohen’s Essential Consultants LLC and Stormy Daniels, with Cohen insisting on a $1 million per violation “damages” provision, which Davidson thought would be unenforceable.
But Trump’s secret frolics didn’t stay secret for long. On November 4, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Enquirer had caught and killed Karen McDougal’s sex affair allegation. Lucky Trump, though, there was no more detail than that, and James Comey had just but her emails’d. Four days later Trump won the election anyway.
PROSECUTOR: When the article came out about Karen McDougal's agreement, how did Michael Cohen react?
DAVIDSON: He was angry, about the timing, just before the election.
PROSECUTOR: And this, on the election night, what did you write?
DAVIDSON: What have we done?
PROSECUTOR: What did you mean?
DAVIDSON: That we may have helped get Donald Trump elected.
PROSECUTOR: What did Dylan Howard respond with?
DAVIDSON: OMG — oh my God.
After the election, cheap-ass Trump was not only not paying Cohen back his money, he didn’t invite their three taints to his inauguration. “I asked him to get me a room at Trump Hotel and he couldn’t even do that,” lamented Howard to Cohen. “But you clearly hold more cards based on everything. He should be able to get you tix.”
DAVIDSON: Later Michael Cohen called me, I was in a strangely decorated department store [with an “Alice in Wonderland” theme]. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, can you fucking believe I'm not going to DC, after everything I'd done for that fucking guy, I've saved his ass so many times. That fucking guy’s not even paid me the $130,000 back. I can't believe I'm not going to Washington. I've saved that guy’s ass so many times you don’t even know.’
BOVE: In the Alice in Wonderland conversation, Michael Cohen was down?
DAVIDSON: I thought he was going to kill himself.
BOVE: He'd told you he thought he'd be chief of staff, or attorney general, right?
DAVIDSON: He had.
SAD! Pay attention, Trump lawyers, that bus will arrive for you!
Fast forward to January 12, 2018, and the Wall Street Journal got a hold of the Stormy Daniels story. Keith Davidson fired off a denial on her behalf:
“I recently became aware that certain news outlets are alleging that I had a sexual and/or romantic affair. [...] I am stating with complete clarity that this is absolutely false. [...] Rumors that I have received hush money from Donald Trump are completely false.”
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked Davidson if the statement was true.
“An extremely strict reading of this denial would technically be true,” he wormed. “I think you have to go through it word by word.”
“'Sexual and/or romantic affair,” how is that technically correct?” Steinglass wondered.
“I think you have to hone in on the definition of romantic, sexual and affair. I don’t think that anyone had ever alleged that any interaction between she and Mr. Trump was romantic.”
“How about sexual?” Steinglass asked.
“Well, that would be sexual and/or romantic.”
Far be it from us to call someone bad at his chosen profession, in this case the law, but “and/or” means “and or or,” it doesn’t mean both, you idiot who doesn’t even know how to dance around a denial.
And would the words “hush money” be technically accurate? “It wasn’t hush money and it wasn’t a payoff. It was consideration of a civil settlement agreement.”
Well, then. Also technically, Stormy didn’t violate the NDA, the Wall Street Journal broke the story. And technically they couldn’t keep her from appearing in public, such as on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after the State of the Union address, unless they wanted to sue her, which would expose their whole tawdry jerkaroo even more.
Cohen screamed he’d “rain legal hell down upon her,” but Stormy chose to not give a fuck. She appeared on “Kimmel” claiming the signature on the no-even-technically-true weasel statement Davidson wrote for her was not hers, which made Cohen go even more apeshit, screaming to Davidson, “you don't know who you are, fucking him!”
Cohen also briefly tried to publicly imply he was the one fucking her, and had Davidson draft an email to then-journalist Chris Cuomo claiming that Cohen had paid Stormy Daniels with his own personal funds, and that part was another technically the truth. (Four days later, Trump, Weisselberg and Cohen met in the Oval Office to make a plan to pay Cohen back.)
There was a break, and Trump lawyer Susan Necheles asked Judge Merchan to vet some Truth posts before they were posted, because she can’t figure out the order, it’s so ambiguous! Merchan told her he wasn’t going to fucking babysit, and “if in doubt, steer clear.”
After break, it was Emil Boh-vay for the defense cross. Don’t be fooled by his goofy looks, he was once a serious guy, co-chief of the Southern District of New York’s terrorism and international narcotics unit! He prosecuted the Chelsea pressure-cooker bomber and a drug-trafficking case against the former Honduran president’s brother. And now here he is, asking Davidson if he helped remove a story about Trump getting spanked with a rolled-up copy of Forbes magazine from a blog called “The Dirty.”
Bove asked if nondisclosures were common, and if Davidson was worried about being charged with extortion.
“Not particularly.”
“You were investigated for extortion under Florida law in 2012?”
Yes, he was, Davidson wrote the contract between Hulk Hogan and a Florida DJ who wanted $300,000 for Hogan’s stolen sex tape, though Davidson claimed he didn’t know the tape was stolen, and was not charged. It’s a small, dirty world.
BOVE: You represented Dawn Holland leaking about Lindsay Lohan in rehab, TMZ paid her $10,000?
DAVIDSON: I don't recall. I don't know what you are referring to.
BOVE: You brokered the Tila Tequila sex tape? You were on a 90-day Bar suspension?
DAVIDSON: I don't recall.
BOVE: You extracted money from Charlie Sheen, right?
DAVIDSON: There's no extraction.
BOVE: You caused Charlie Sheen to pay.
DAVIDSON: There was tortious behavior.
BOVE: We're both lawyers. I'm not here to play legal games. I just want truthful answers.
DAVIDSON: You're getting truthful answers. And if you're not here to play legal games, don't use words like "extract."
OOOOOOOO, TOOSHAY!!
Bove may have been a prosecutor, but Davidson has been at this technically the truth shit for decades all day, every day. Bove pried about Capri Anderson and Charlie Sheen, Hulk Hogan and Manny Paquiato, but Davidson wasn’t biting.
BOVE: You kept working with Michael Cohen, after Stormy — he sent you a client?
DAVIDSON: He sent me a non-paying client.
BOVE: What about Summer Zervos? And Shera Bechard who claimed sex with Elliott Broidy?
Davidson said he didn’t recall, but we sure do!
BOVE: Do you recall telling Mr. Cohen, “if he loses the election, and he will, this story is worth zero, we have no f-ing leverage?”
DAVIDSON: Yes.
Soon after, Davidson was fired, and onetime dreamboat (we were young and stupid) Michael Avenatti hired. Davidson’s time on the stand finished with Bove playing a pitiful recorded phone call from Cohen.
"I’m sitting there saying to myself, ‘what about me. What about me.’ I can’t even tell you how many times he said to me 'I hate the fact that we did it,' and my comment to him was ‘but every person that we’ve spoken to tells you it was the right move.’”
To be continued! And also …
OPEN THREAD!
Tonight the Empire State Building is in blue, red, pink and yellow in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Sports Foundation.
https://substack.com/profile/155618292-ziggywiggy/note/c-55416735?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
Open Thread Chat May 2. Dog or bear?
https://substack.com/chat/1783367/post/b134e3f0-e2fb-41ee-8557-54661a41debd