Trump Trial Week Two: Here Comes The Estrogen Mafia!

Don gets found in contempt, sentenced to attend Barron's graduation.

Stamina!

Welcome to week two of The Don’s criminal trial! You can catch up on last week’s goings on here and here! 

Tuesday started out with some WHOA! Eric showed up to lend his Beavis face to the proceedings, so now we can stop pointing out how even Jeffrey Dahmer had family members supporting him in court. Loyal Eric also visited Maria Bartiromo on Fox News on Sunday to brag about his dad’s “stamina” and how “great” he’s feeling. 

“He is going all over the place. His stamina, Maria, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he said of the man who has appeared to fall asleep every day of his trial, and did so again today, twice, before lunch. Eric also complained that he can’t figure out how to buy “skin lotion” in NYC drugstores because Biden has personally locked it all in Plexiglas, which is why he didn’t look as supple as usual. Sad! 

AND, Judge Juan Merchan held Trump in contempt for violating his gag order nine times, demanded Trump take down the offending “Truth” posts by the end of lunchtime, fined him $9,000, and said that because $1,000 per blab might not do it, “jail may be a necessary punishment” when he takes up the other four violations next Thursday! OOO LA LA.  

Does Trump really think it would be to his advantage somehow to join Allen Weisselberg for baloney sandwiches in Rikers? Now here’s a quick and easy way to find out! Weirdly, the old gasbag seems to have finally shut up about the jurors/judge’s daughter, and spent his weekend ranting about RFK Jr. and meeting with his frenemy Meatball Ron, instead. 

Merchan, nice guy that he is, also said he’d grant permission for Trump to attend Barron’s graduation on May 17, causing “Poor Barron” to immediately trend on Xitter. Junior and Fox News will get right on apologizing for spreading the lie that Trump was forbidden to attend graduation by that mean judge, any minute now!

Then back on the stand this morning was Gary Farro, former banker for Michael Cohen, here with receipts for the “payout” part. 

You’ll recall last week David Pecker testified how he used $30k of his company AMI’s money to buy a draconian NDA from a doorman peddling a made-up story that Trump had a baby with a maid, and also $150,000 and a fitness column to nudie model Karen McDougal for her exclusive “life rights” so Karen wouldn’t go dishing dirty details of her love affair with Trump to ABC in exchange for a spot on “Dancing With The Stars.” 

But when it came to Pecker’s attention that a payoff-a-roo was illegal actually, and Jeff Sessions was not going to pop out of Trump’s breast pocket and ride to his rescue, he backed out of the scheme and told Cohen not to pay him back. And then when Stormy Daniels appeared with her One Night in Tahoe hanky panky story, Pecker told a pissed-off Cohen to go hushy-payoff her his own self.

Banker Ferro called Cohen a “difficult” client, who urgently and screamily directed him to open, then close, then open a different LLC, coinciding with the aborted plan to buy Karen’s story rights from Pecker, and $130k going from Michael Cohen’s home equity line to pay off Daniels. (And now, less than an hour into the day, Trump started closing his eyes and possibly nodding off.)

Todd Blanche was up batting for the defense team this morning, and compared to some of Trump’s previous lawyers (Habba, cough cough), this group is no joke, though there’s only so many holes to be poked here, and the delay game has worn thin.

Blanche is a former prosecutor for SDNY who moved to private practice and became a partner at posh Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, where he represented Paul Manafort and that chucklefuck Igor Fruman, and was retained by Boris Epshteyn even before he got indicted in Arizona. (That guy is everywhere!) But when it came time to defend the Big Man himself, New York magazine reports in an interesting profile how the law firm Cadwalader told him he had to choose between being partner and representing Trump, who promised to “make him famous.” So he left his cushy white-shoe life to head three out of four of Trump's criminal defense teams, instead.

Blanche’s defense strategy in a nutshell, according to “someone familiar”: “You just need one juror who is sitting back there going, This guy is a piece of shit, but this is political.”

Next up, two clips for the jury. One from C-SPAN, with Trump ranting at a rally in response to stories of women alleging sexual assault after the “Access Hollywood” tape was released in October 2016. “These are all horrible lies, fabricated. As you have seen, right now I’m being viciously attacked with lies and smears. It’s a phony deal. I have no idea who these women are!” Also video from his E. Jean deposition. At around noon Trump started snoozing again. STAMINA!!

WAKE UP, next it’s Keith Davidson! That’s Karen and Stormy’s scuzzo lawyer, who got hired because he knew Karen’s former brother-in-law. Davidson testified he had his own law firm and was acquaintances with Gina Rodriguez and Dylan Howard at AMI, and represented Karen for the NDA, while being a bitch behind her back also.

Some texts!

On June 10, AMI editor Dylan Howard texted Davidson, "Did he cheat on Melania?" He asked again on June 12, "Do you know if the affair was during his marriage to Melania?" 

"I really can't say yet. Sorry," Davidson finally responded to Howard on June 12, which was actually tabloid code for “you bet your ass it was.” “I was not prepared to discuss the details at that point,” Davidson told prosecutors. 

So Dylan Howard met with McDougal in what Davidson called a “proffer session” (as if Karen was a criminal here!) At first AMI declined to buy the story, because Karen didn’t have documentary evidence. But Davidson sweated them, and let him know he was also negotiating with ABC News’s Brian Ross, and Michael Cohen was freaking the fuck out also. “I said, ‘Don't forget Michael Cohen... Time is of the essence. The girl is being cornered by the estrogen mafia.”

PROSECUTOR: What did you mean?

DAVIDSON: It was a regrettable text I sent. There were several women leaning on Karen to sign the deal with ABC.

If only the estrogen mafia were real! 

DAVIDSON: Then Dylan said, We are going to lay it on thick for her. Karen was teetering between National Enquirer versus ABC. I said, ‘Throw in an ambassadorship for me. I'm thinking, the Isle of Man.’ It was sort of a jest.

PROSECUTOR: Why was that funny?

DAVIDSON: Well, I don't think that the Isle of Man is even a country. So no ambassador there. It was a reference to Donald Trump, that if this helped him and he won, there would be jobs.

PROSECUTOR: What did Dylan Howard write?

DAVIDSON: She'll get more than from ABC.

Yes, the Isle of Man is not a country, and yes, you should’ve listened to the estrogen mafia, Karen! O hindsight. We could have had no Trump presidency, Karen would have been on “Dancing With The Stars,” and we would all be living on the moon. But it was not to be. The estrogen mafia never wins.

And with that, we leave for lunch!

More later, XOXO