Trump Indicted by Manhattan District Attorney

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Legally, this is not a big deal, but still ...

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This, on the other hand, is a big deal legally.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Boom!

[N.E. Brigand]

Legally, this is not a big deal, but still ...

It may not matter legally whether or not Donald Trump really had a months-long affair with Karen McDougal and a one-night stand with Stormy Daniels, but I think the jury would be more inclined to let Trump off the hook if they believed the two stories were untrue. I see that Lisa Rubin noted that David Pecker testified that Trump referred to McDougal as a "nice girl" when it came time to pay her to stay silent.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yes, that is what I meant.

[N.E. Brigand]

I've been busy at work and only read bits of today's news. I see that David Pecker testified that Michael Cohen told him that "Jeff Sessions is the attorney general and Donald Trump has him in his pocket."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Yes, after Pecker expressed concern about being prosecuted for campaign finance violations.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

My post has been slow in the writing, but to elaborate on what V notes:

Rhona Graff, who was Donald Trump's executive assistant, today testified that Trump's Outlook contacts, which she maintained, included an entry (including email, phone number, and two physical addresses) for Karen McDougal, the Playboy playmate whose story of a nearly year-long affair with Trump in 2005-2006 -- around the time that Trump's wife Melania* was giving birth to their son Barron -- was bought and suppressed by David Pecker's National Enquirer as part of a scheme to help Trump win the 2016 election.

Graff also testified that those contacts include a number for an otherwise unidentified "Stormy." Graff also remembered seeing Stormy Daniels once at Trump Tower, and despite efforts by Trump's lawyers to get Graff to confirm their theory that Daniels was there as a possible participant on Trump's Celebrity Apprentice TV show, Graff said she didn't remember that.

I never watched Celebrity Apprentice, but I just reviewed a list of all candidates on the seven seasons for which Trump was the host (that's approximately 100 people from 2007-08 to 2014-15) and looked up details for all names unfamiliar to me. As far as I can see, no pornography performers were among the contestants. There were several models, including three appeared in Playboy magazine, all of them named "Playmate of the Year": Brande Roderick (2001), Tiffany Fallon (2005), and Hope Dworaczyk Smith (2010), appearing on the 2008-09, 2007-08, and 2010-2011 episodes. As it happens, Karen [McDougal was the Playboy "Playmate of the Year" in 1998. So, unlike Stormy Daniels, McDougal was "qualified" to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, but that's not an argument that Trump's team has tried to make.

*By the way, today is Melania Trump's 54th birthday.

Edited to add: Trump complained late this afternoon that he was unable to be with Melania today. What prevented her from coming up to New York so they could go out to dinner?

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Edited to add: Donald Trump apparently fell asleep in court again today. (And later he complained that the courtroom is too cold deliberately to hurt him.)

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Edited again to note something that may or may not be connected to this case. I either didn't know or had forgotten something that wasn't reported until a few days after Donald Trump won the 2016 election: in August 2015, he "registered eight companies ... that appear to be tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia". As Seth Abramson has been pointing out for some time, that was also when Trump struck a deal to have the National Enquirer help his campaign by publishing negative stories about his rivals and buying and burying negative stories about him, and David Pecker did testify this week that he expected either Trump (via MIchael Cohen) or "someone else" to pay him to do that. And as many people noted with confusion in 2018, AMI, Pecker's company that publishes the National Enquirer, that year pubished a weird ad-free pro-Saudi one-issue magazine titled The New Kingdom that was sold on newstands across the U.S., and AMI later asked the Justice Dept. whether it needed to register as a foreign agent. However, even if there is a connection, we're unlikely to learn about it during this trial, because it muddies the waters for both the prosecution and defense.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Justice Merchan has ruled that Trump violated the gag order on 9 of the 10 alleged occasions and fined him $10,000 for each, warning that further violations will potentially result in incarceration.

[N.E. Brigand]

Justice Merchan has ruled that Trump violated the gag order on 9 of the 10 alleged occasions and fined him $10,000 for each, warning that further violations will potentially result in incarceration.

I thought the law limited the penalty to either jail time or just $1,000 per instance?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Typo. (or perhaps wishful thinking)

[N.E. Brigand]

Typo. (or perhaps wishful thinking)

Heh. Thanks for confirming. I wondered if maybe there was some other provision that hadn't been previously reported. So it's $9,000 total this time.

Meanwhile, Lisa Rubin reports on how Donald Trump's legal strategy today is apparently to slow down the trial. Prosecutors have video evidence of Trump speaking that they wish to introduce into evidence. Some of the videos publicly aired on C-SPAN. Others were recorded during his deposition in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuits. In both cases, Trump apparently refused to stipulate that the videos are legitimate, so prosecutors have had to call technicians from CSPAN and from the deposition transcription company that recorded the video as witnesses. (And pay to fly them to New York.) Normally evidence from reputable sources like this isn't subject to such scrutiny. What's more, despite requiring the state to bring in these witnesses, the defense has no questions for them.

The video they provided demonstrated that Trump publicly denied multiple accusations of sexual assault that were made in October 2016, that he said those claims could hurt his chances of winning the election, that he promised to sue those accusers after the election, and also that he praised Michael Cohen.

Edited to add: Those were the videos from CSPAN. The videos from the deposition merely show Donald Trump saying what Truth Social is, confirming his handle there, confirming that he married Melania in 2005 and is still married to her, and confirming that it really is his voice on the Access Hollywood tape.

[N.E. Brigand]

NBC reports that Donald Trump again appears to have fallen asleep during his trial today.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Trump removed the posts that violated the gag order as ordered by the judge. Justice Merchan did day he would've imposed a higher fine if he could have.

Eric Trump is in the courtroom today, the first time in this trial a family member has appeared to support Trump.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is a detail I don't recall seeing before.

[N.E. Brigand]

We heard about the "What have we done?" line in the prosecutors' opening statement last week, but the "Oh my god" is new.

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I see that the testimony today of attorney/tabloid go-between Keith Davidson mentioned the first time the story of Stormy Daniels's fling with Donald Trump was made public, in a little-seen gossip website in 2011, and that when Trump's fixer Michael Cohen then called and screamed at Daniels's manager Gina Rodriguez, Davidson was successful in getting the gossip site to take the story down. Davidson said that Daniels did not want the story published. (At least not then.) My presumption is that Daniels told some friends about sleeping with Trump and they told others and it made its way to that site. (I did not realize that the gossip website did repost the story after the Access Hollywood leak in 2016.)

It's probably not going to happen, but I do wish that somehow this trial would reveal the truth about whether or not Trump (or Cohen acting on his behalf) sent a goon to threaten Daniels at around that time. Daniels said in 2018 that someone approached her and made ominous comments about what would happen if she went publica about her relationship with Trump. Her attorney in 2018, Michael Avenatti (soon to crash and burn spectacularly), had her provide a description to a sketch artist. When that sketch was shared online, Trump mocked Daniels and said, in not quite so many words, that she made the whole thing up. She sued him for defamation. A federal judge later tossed out the lawsuit as frivolous on the grounds that Trump's statement was "rhetorical hyperbole," and the judge required Daniels to pay Trump nearly $300,000 in attorneys' fees. An appeals court later affirmed that judgment. But in their deliberations, the appeals panel mentioned one point that never made it into their opinion and which very few people have picked up on:

If Trump actually had someone threaten Daniels, then his attack on her for saying so can't be rhetorical hyperbole.

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It's bizarre that one reason we're in court now is that Donald Trump made Michael Cohen pay for this. Was Trump just that broke at the time?

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Did we previously know that the names Peggy Peterson and David Dennison were chosen as pseudonyms for Daniels and Trump in the "Resolution Consultants" deal because P = Plaintiff and D = Defendant? (I feel like someone at least guessed that explanation.)

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Sounds like prosecutors struggled to get Davidson to repeat something he said in grand jury testimony.

[Sunsilver]

Having read Cohen's book, it would not surprise me to find out that he was the one who threatened Daniels.

[N.E. Brigand]

Having read Cohen's book, it would not surprise me to find out that he was the one who threatened Daniels.

Oh, he's definitely the type to threaten folks, but perhaps not physically. There was laughter in the courtroom yesterday when Keith Davidson, the attorney who represented Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels in their negotiations with the National Enquirer and/or Donald Trump, said that nobody wanted to deal with Cohen, whom was generally thought to be a very unpleasant person.

So Cohen might have told somebody to menace Daniels, but if he had done it himself, she surely would have recognized him in 2018 and wouldn't have needed the services of a sketch artist.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Very interesting comments by Ben Wittes of Lawfare today on their podcast about this case. He was one of those people who felt that is case was the weakest and least important of the four cases in which Trump was charged, but after sitting through the first week of the case, he has changed his mind. His view now is that it is appropriate that this the case that is coming to trial before the election this year, both because the tawdry nature of the facts is very Trumpian and more importantly that the subject matter of Trump trying to control the information stream to prevent negative information about him from affecting the election is very apt in this time.