Trump Trial Day 16: Michael Cohen Foam Party!
Trump Trial Day 16: Michael Cohen Foam Party!
Cohen unclogged Trump's toilet then got the shaft.
Monday was Day 16 of the criminal trial of the loneliest, maddest, most upsettest man who ever lived, and also a special day, Michael Cohen Day! May 13 will now be when we celebrate how someone can be the worst shrieking asshole in the world, yet still have a redemption arc, at least once they are backed into a corner with no other options, and are as pissed off as a stuck pig.
Cohen did more than a year in the Otisville slammer for Trump, and now he is here to ride that motherfucker’s ass to hell.
What was most oof on Monday? There was so much!
Cohen testified that Trump’s plan was to try to catch the story and push the deal past the election, then stiff Stormy, because if Trump didn’t win the story would be worthless.
He said he recorded a meeting with Trump and David Pecker because Pecker wanted to be the CEO of Time magazine, and they wanted to make sure Pecker “stayed loyal,” and also to convince Pecker that he wouldn’t end up getting stiffed, in case the circle jerk turned into a backstab.
And not only did Trump not worry at all about what Melania might think about his bimbo eruptions, it was Melania who came up with the “locker room talk” line after the “Access Hollywood” story broke, and Melania who made sure Trump returned Cohen’s call about the porny payments, knowingly or not.
Oh, and before instructing Cohen to set up a shell company for lady payments, Allen Weisselberg suggested that they should launder the money through a relative’s wedding or bar mitzvah. And of course we heard how Trump himself approved of the payments, repeatedly telling Cohen to “just do it,” and “figure it out,” reassuring him he’d be paid back.
What a nest of lowlifes, Jeziz H!
Got all day to catch up on the trial so far? Here are the previous posts!
Let us recap, then give the play-by-play!
A Recap, and Then the Play-by-Play!
Michael Cohen was Trump’s Iago, his fixer, his toady of a decade, who screamed at reporters for him, paid off Stormy Daniels for him, threatened to sue whoever said bad things about him, even “The Onion,” when they published a Trump article titled “When You're Feeling Low, Just Remember I'll Be Dead In About 15 or 20 Years.” He was there when Trump first thought about running in 2011, and got TheDirty dot com to scrub a Stormy story way back then. He was doggedly loyal even while Trump treated him like literal shit, forcing him to handle a backed-up toilet at his Trump Tower apartment.
But unlike a Trump Tower toilet, loyalty only flows one way! While Cohen was being raided by the FBI in 2018, he ran out to buy a burner phone to call his The Boss for help, and The Boss immediately hung up on him. A fine howdy-doo! And that was the last contact they had outside of a courtroom. Trump quit paying Cohen’s legal bills, and hilariously sued Cohen to try to get his hush money back, plus an extra $500 million dollars, because why not? (Getting deposed was a good why not, and Trump dropped the very SLAPPY suit four days before that was supposed to happen.) The last time they saw each other was when Cohen testified about the Trump Org’s cooked books in that New York civil trial last year.
Cohen is the one witness who can tie this whole scheme directly to Trump, aka “Individual-1.” He already went to prison for the very exact set of facts that Trump is now being charged with. Read about it on pages 14-15 of his indictment yourself! Cohen ended up pleading guilty in 2018 to eight counts of tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations, and served about 13 months, part of that in solitary confinement in a sweltering cell, which also had a broken toilet, because toilets are a theme. Stormy Daniels as a human orange turd toilet, shredded papers in the toilet, classified documents on the toilet tank, look at this one, look at that one!
And now here we are,
Monday, Day 16 of the sacred proceedings!
There were a lot of guests in the fart zone — Eric Trump, Alina Habba, Boris Ephsteyn, New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, Ohio yokel human butthair statue Sen. JD Vance, and dumbest man in the Senate, Tommy Tuberville, who only lasted about 90 minutes in court before going to moan on the courthouse steps about how disappointing and depressing court is. And a rare appearance in the house, your host, Alan Bragg himself.
First a bit of business: Justice Juan Merchan won’t let in Allen Weisselberg’s hinky $750,000 hush-money separation agreement without Weisselberg being bused over from Rikers, because hearsay. And neither side wants to subpoena lyin’ Allen, who would have nothing to gain from the exercise but more Rikers. How to account to the jury for his absence, or why he’s not a co-defendant for this one? We shall see.
And then in came the jury and Michael Dean Cohen!
Cohen gave a recap of his life pre-Trump, starting as a personal injury lawyer with an office on Broadway, very “Bonfire of The Vanities,” also buying taxi medallions, and meeting Trump through Don Junior by working on handling “a situation” at Trump World Tower.
He got a job with the Trump Org, and Trump immediately stiffed him on a 100K invoice for work he did before he was hired, because Trump is a trifling asshole who fucks people over just for the fun of it. Cohen asked for his money and Trump hissed at him, “Do you want to get fired on your first day?" That should’ve been a red flag! But Cohen sucked it up, dropped the subject, ate the money, and toadied his way up to making $525k a year, screwing over others as he had been screwed, doing shit like cornholing Trump University vendors to settle for taking 20 cents on the dollar. Cohen says he enjoyed it!
By 10 a.m., Trump was already falling asleep in court, and he dozed on and off throughout the day.
Anyhoo, the Trump/Cohen vendor-screwage operation was screwing along fine, until Trump warned him before he announced that he was running for president in 2015, “‘You know that when this comes out, just be prepared there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward.’”
That was surely a “no shit” moment. Being a perpetually horny rich womanizer was a big chunk of his personal brand, and he bragged about it incessantly.
So Cohen and Trump set up that meeting with Pecker, and Cohen corroborated the whole bit about how he and Trump ballsily demanded that Pecker publish good stories about Trump and bad stories about everybody else, and let Cohen edit the Enquirer political pages like an evil little Katherine Graham, which he did: “Hillary Clinton wearing very thick glasses, some allegations she had some brain injury. Ted Cruz's father with [Lee Harvey] Oswald. Marco Rubio in a pool with a bunch of other men, claims of a drug binge of some sort.”
Who could forget the Marco Rubio foam party?
And it wasn’t too long before the catchy-killy side of their troika had its first customers: Dino the doorman, then Karen McDougal, repped by sleazo lawyer Keith Davidson. Cohen corroborated Pecker’s retelling of the McDougal chain of events, how the plan was first to repay Pecker the $150k that AMI wired to Keith Davidson for the catchy-killy-fitness-column-swapperoo, before Pecker withdrew and suddenly didn’t want his money after all.
Lordy, there is tape! From September 6, 2016:
COHEN: I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken —
TRUMP: Give it to me and get me a —
COHEN: And, I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with —
TRUMP: So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?
COHEN: — funding. Yes. And it’s all the stuff.
TRUMP: Yes, I was thinking about that.
COHEN: All the stuff. Because — here, you never know where that company, you never know what he’s —
TRUMP: Maybe he gets hit by a truck
COHEN: Correct. So, I’m all over that. And, I spoke to Allen about it, when it comes time for the financing, which will be —
TRUMP: Listen, what financing?
COHEN: We’ll have to pay him something.
TRUMP: (INAUDIBLE) pay with cash.
COHEN: No, no, no, no, no, I got it.
“All the stuff” meant that mystery box of whatever other records of Trump misdeeds they thought Pecker might have. Trump had been mis-deeding so long, there could’ve been anything in there!
Cohen went to Allen Weisselberg at the Trump Org to get the Karen cash, but Weisselberg was like, hell no, $150k from the Trump Org is too obvious, dummy. “The point is not to have the Trump name affiliated to this at all.” So Cohen decided to set up a shell corporation all on his own.
Fortunately the Karen problem worked itself out when Pecker decided to cover the $150k. Pecker testified two weeks ago that he withdrew from the McDougal deal because a lawyer told him the FEC would get up his ass like a Borneo pinworm, but Cohen testified that Pecker explained he was dropping out because Karen had sold him plenty of magazines, so he didn’t need the money, fuhgeddaboudit. Guess Pecker didn’t want to hand Team Trump one more piece of potential blackmail by spelling out in neon for Cohen that they were doing CRIMES together. And maybe the FEC would not even notice!
And then out came that “Access Hollywood” tape, uh oh! Cohen testified Trump said it was “catastrophic” and “horrible” for the campaign.
“The spin he wanted put on it was that this is locker-room talk,” Cohen testified, “something that Melania had recommended, or at least he told me that’s what Melania had thought it was, and use that in order to get control over the story and to minimize its impact on him and his campaign.” Melania went on Anderson Cooper, saying that accusations that her husband was a creep were “lies,” and Trump was “egged into” “boy talk.” (She’s sure being less supportive this time around.)
And then in a double-nut-punch, Stormy! Cohen and Trump freaked the fuck out:
"I immediately went to Mr. Trump’s office, knocked on the door. ‘Boss, I've got to speak to you.’ I told him that one of the things that we need to do is obviously take care of it. He said, 'Absolutely. Do it. Take care of it. [...] I thought you had this under control. [...] ‘This is a disaster, a total disaster, women are going to hate me. This is really a disaster. Women will hate me. Guys, they think it’s cool. But this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.’"
Guys, do you think it’s cool?
Cohen testified Trump told him, "I want you to just push it out as long as you can, just get past the election, because if I win it will have no relevance because I'm president, and if I lose, I don't even care."
Cohen asked Trump, “How are things gonna go upstairs?” Referring to Melania, who was ensconced in the golden aerie of the Trump tower triplex above.
Said Trump, “Don't worry. How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long.”
No wonder Melania hates him! Christ, what a little shit.
Cohen asked Allen Weisselberg himself to pay the $130k in Stormy hush money, but Allen was less of a sucker, and said he couldn’t afford to because he had “four kids in prep school.” Instead, he suggested they launder the money through a golf tournament or “somebody who was having a family affair,” such as a wedding or bar mitzvah. Hot tip from Allen, future money launderers! Now we see why nobody wanted him here, and Allen would rather stay in Rikers than incriminate himself even more.
Like the Little Red Hen, Cohen then asked Pecker for the payoff, and Pecker said “not a chance.” Cohen couldn’t offpay the peening through his household accounts, or his wife would notice. So set up a shell account, Resolution Consultants LLC., with his own name on it, and got his own little money-laundering mise-en place together.
In court Trump woke up and got visibly pissed, shaking his head.
Cohen said he told Trump that he would "front the money," and Trump was “appreciative” in turn.
“Good, good,” Cohen remembers Trump saying.
Cohen, master vendor-screwer that he was, set about holding Keith Davidson off as long as Davidson would stand it, claiming excuses like Yom Kippur and Trump being on a plane, until Davidson told him the deal was off, and Stormy would be going to the Daily Mail instead. Cohen left a frantic voicemail for Trump, and got a text back from Melania, telling him to call Trump’s cell.
He said Trump told him, “Don’t worry. You’ll get paid back,” and so on October 27, 2016, they did the agreement, plus the Peggy Peterson/David Dennison other agreement, and Cohen wired Davidson that money.
Would Cohen have made the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels without getting "sign-off" from Trump?
“No,” Cohen said. “Because everything required Mr. Trump's sign-off” and “I wanted the money back." No shit! So much for the “goodness of his heart.”
Did he get that money back in a timely way? HA! Not only did he not, but Trump slashed his bonus by two-thirds, because, again, cheap trifling asshole who shafts people for the fun of it. Then Weisselberg ass-dragged on the payments, because that’s what everybody in that shitty company did. Finally, more than two months later, Weisselberg, Mister “Don’t Make It Too Obvious,” figured out that plan THAT HE WROTE UP ON TRUMP STATIONERY to mete out those payments as a juiced-up “retainer,” for never-to-be-described “legal services” that were never performed.
Then the Karen McDougal story hit the Wall Street Journal two days before the election, because NDAs only cover the people who are on them, stupid. Trump was livid and accused the Enquirer of doing it. (We were later to learn he was correct, it was AMI editor Lachlan Cartwright.)
Cohen had hoped for a White House job, and Trump told him he would be named “general counsel.”
Someone texted Cohen: “Congratulations on being President Trump’s personal counsel (consigliere)!”
But despite all of Cohen’s loyalty, Trump shafted him AGAIN, and gave him the unpaid title of “personal attorney.” But Cohen never did actual work for Trump again, his “retainer” was a no-show job, and he was as good as effectively YER FIRED.
And so Monday ended, and Trump blahed his usual blah on the courthouse steps, and the right-wing media was all NO CRIME! BE REAL MAD, THIS SO UNFAIR!
But it ain’t looking great for their Lord Emperor. During opening arguments three weeks ago, Toddles Blanche promised the jury that the defense was going to prove that those Stormy payments were not reimbursements, they were some kind of legit expense, or something, even though in other court filings Trump’s own lawyers asserted they were, his controller Jeff McConney said they were, and Trump’s own Tweet said they were. You can’t charge him for illegal activity he admits to, no tagbacks!
“Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA. These agreements are…...very common among celebrities and people of wealth. In this case it is in full force and effect and will be used in Arbitration for damages against Ms. Clifford (Daniels). The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair.........despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair. Prior to its violation by Ms. Clifford and her attorney this was a private agreement. Money from the campaign or campaign contributions played no roll [sic] in this transaction. ”
(Ellipses Trump’s own.)
But Cohen just blew that obviously false notion right out of the water. Blanche also promised that Trump was going to testify in his own defense, and that motherfucker is so pompous, nuts, and narcissistically blind, he might really do it. It would be a disaster, just like it was when he took the stand in the New York civil fraud trial, and the second E. Jean Carroll defamation case, but he is a disaster who just called Jimmy Carter “Jimmy Connors” and praised Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter, so who knows what he’ll do next. Always keep ‘em guessing!
Cohen will be back on the stand today, and cross-examination is coming. Will Blanche and Susan Necheles hector and harangue him with claws out on the cross like they did Stormy Daniels? They didn’t have a lot of objections on Monday. Will there be another witness after Cohen? We don’t know, but possibly not!
Until next time!
Ta, Marcie. I'm listening to MSNBC's team talk about today's testimony.
So, TFG's channeling Paulie Walnuts these days:
"He's about to have a friend for dinner! *elbow nudge* Did'ja hear what I said there? I said, 'He's about to have a friend for dinner!' *elbow nudge* Huh? Huh?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajPFWfZu_iQ&ab_channel=borko