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Posts posted by Hugo Stiglitz
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Just now, bolverk said:
What a fucking weirdo.
But after Trump sued him for libel shortly after his biography came out, O’Brien’s lawyers deposed Trump in December 2007 — during which Trump admitted he had not, in fact, clandestinely taped O’Brien.
“I’m not equipped to tape-record,” Trump said in the deposition. “I may have said it once or twice to him just to — on the telephone, because everything I said to him he’d write incorrectly; so just to try and keep it honest.”
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President Trump’s personal attorney Michael D. Cohen sometimes taped conversations with associates, according to three people familiar with his practice, and allies of the president are worried that the recordings were seized by federal investigators in a raid of Cohen’s office and residences this week.
Cohen, who served for a decade as a lawyer at the Trump Organization and is a close confidant of Trump, was known to store the conversations using digital files and then replay them for colleagues, according to people who have interacted with him.
“We heard he had some proclivity to make tapes,” said one Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. “Now we are wondering, who did he tape? Did he store those someplace where they were actually seized? . . . Did they find his recordings?”
Cohen did not respond to requests for comment. Stephen Ryan, an attorney for Cohen, declined to comment. A White House spokeswoman referred a request for comment to Cohen and his attorney.
On Monday, FBI agents seized Cohen’s computers and phones as they executed a search warrant that sought, among other records, all communications between the lawyer and Trump and campaign aides about “potential sources of negative publicity” in the lead-up to the 2016 election, The Washington Post reported.
Investigators were also looking for any records related to adult-film star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, who both received payments after alleged affairs with Trump.
It is unknown whether Cohen taped conversations between himself and Trump. But two people familiar with Cohen’s practices said he recorded both business and political conversations. One associate said Trump knew of Cohen’s practice because the attorney would often play him recordings Cohen had made of his conversations with other top Trump advisers.
“It was his standard practice to do it,” this person said.
Legal experts said Cohen’s taped conversations would be viewed by prosecutors as highly valuable.
“If you are looking for evidence, you can’t do any better than people talking on tape,” said Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor.
Such recordings “would be considered a gold mine,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics.
“The significance is 9.5 to 10 on a 10-point scale,” he added, noting that investigators know “that when people speak on the phone, they are not guarded. They don’t imagine that the conversation will surface.”Federal investigators would not automatically get access to any tapes that might have been seized in the raids. First, the recordings would be reviewed by a separate Justice Department team and possibly by a federal judge. The review is designed to protect lawyer-client privilege and to be sure that the conversations turned over are within the terms of the search warrant, legal experts said.
They noted that the privilege accorded to attorney-client communications does not apply if the conversation was conducted to further commission of a crime or fraud.
Cohen wanted his business calls on tape so he could use them later as leverage, one person said. He frequently noted that under New York law, only one party had to consent to the taping of a conversation, this person added.
During the 2016 race, Cohen — who did not have a formal role on the campaign — had a reputation among campaign staff as someone to avoid, in part because he was believed to be secretly taping conversations.
In one instance, Cohen played a recording of a conversation he had with someone else to a Trump campaign official to demonstrate that he was in a position to challenge that person’s veracity if necessary, an associate recalled.
Cohen indicated that he had something to use against the person he had taped, the associate said.
One outside Trump adviser said Cohen may have begun recording his conversations in an attempt to emulate his boss, who has long boasted — often with no evidence — about secretly taping private conversations.
In May, for instance, a report appeared in the New York Times detailing fired FBI director James B. Comey’s account of a one-on-one dinner he had with the president, during which he said Trump asked him to pledge his loyalty to the president and he declined. Shortly after, Trump took to Twitter to cast doubt on Comey’s version of events, seeming to imply that he had secretly recorded their encounter.
“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump wrote.
At the time, it was unclear whether Trump truly possessed tapes of his conversation with Comey or was simply trying to intimidate him. And ultimately, just over a month later, Trump cleared up the mystery by admitting in a duo of tweets that he had not, in fact, recorded Comey.
“With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings,” he wrote.
Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and executive editor of Bloomberg View, wrote a column in the wake of Trump’s taping claim saying that Comey likely had little reason to worry. In the piece, O’Brien recounted that Trump frequently made a similar boast to him.
“Back in the early 2000s, Trump used to tell me all the time that he was recording me when I covered him as reporter for the New York Times,” O’Brien wrote. “He also said the same thing when I was writing a biography of him, ‘Trump Nation.’ I never thought he was, but who could be sure?”
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6 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:
Thanks for waiting until now to dig, media, and not doing it when it could have made a difference when he first ran and was getting you all those ratings and page clicks. Who could have ever thought Donald Trump had affairs and out of wedlock children? This is out of left field!
In fairness, I’m glad the media has been focused on Russia instead of Trump’s bastard children.
Even though the media did completely drop the ball during the campaign on investigating Trump’s past, Trump’s public behavior and statements should have been enough to convince anyone he would be a dangerous, ignorant, and reckless president.
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14 minutes ago, bernorange said:
Hugo - it's one thing to note a political event as a current event. It's another thing to post it with full cloak room partisan invective. The politics board exists to keep that contained.
I don’t disagree. No one should actively seek a partisan political debate on the current events forum.
However, when a topic gets a little political in the dialogue on the current events board and people start calling for bans, give me a fucking break.
Healthy discourse, speaking freely and openly on a current event topic shouldn’t be suppressed or discouraged just because someone feels like their safe space is invaded.
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2 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:
I find this sentiment fascinating. Wouldn’t it be better if it turned out that there is nothing to it and that Trump was just elected as the result of a disgruntled flyover populace and a terrible opponent?
Understand that I’m not stating that I think there is nothing to it. There’s too much smoke and I think Mueller will find something, and punishment should be appropriate, from fines up to impeachment.
But actively hoping that it’s the worst case scenario is weird.-
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If you think your week was bad, a bunch of kids are about to find out Trump is their father on the news.
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Cloaking up the the Football board I can see as egregious malfeasance that should be ban worthy because no one wants their sports and politics mixed.
However, complaining about politics coming up on the current events board seems like safe space snowflake type whining.
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Trump is so pissed
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Just now, EuroHorn said:
Well the Twitter person said two sources said so...
Or Trump confessed to it multiple times in tweets and public interviews.
But maybe Mueller won’t see that.
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This needs to be awful.
It needs to be painful.
It needs to last so it will be remembered.
It needs to be remembered so it never happens again.
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not sure if put in Cohen thread, Indictment thread, or Trump thread.
This is all very confusing.
Mueller is like a doctor doing a checkup on the President and he discovered cancer EVERYWHERE!
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Melania must be into water sports.
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I wonder if Mueller found evidence of obstruction of justice?
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I wasn’t being serious
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Would be awesome if the housekeeper was Russian.
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5 minutes ago, burntorangebongos said:
I don't believe it.
Me neither, no sane woman would see a Trump pregnancy to term unless there was money involved.
However, those fake stories about Bill Clinton’s illegitimate child now makes perfect sense.
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Thank you Smokey
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In order to get agreement on budget caps to allow a spending bill to pass and avoid a government shutdown, Speaker Paul Ryan promised the Freedom Caucus they could have a meaningless vote to show the folks back home that the deficit mattered to them. That's after they passed a nearly $2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. That meaningless vote will happen Thursday, when they will bring the amendment up under a suspension of the rules.
Wait, you say—don't they use suspension votes for things that aren't policy, like naming post offices and declaring National Donut Day? Yes. They also have a habit of doing it for this and in fact did it in 2011, when the late and very great Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York blasted them for it: "To give a constitutional amendment the same consideration as renaming a post office is embarrassing for us and a disgrace to the dignity and tradition of the House," she said.
The Democratic Whip's office lambastes Republicans this time around for a "political stunt that is meant for Republicans to appear to care about fiscal responsibility."
Instead, it is an extreme and dangerous proposal that would potentially force cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid by requiring a three-fifths vote to run a deficit, regardless of recessions or major disasters. […]
H.J.Res. 2 is purely ideological. The United States of America has never written specific fiscal policy preferences into the Constitution, which is what this resolution seeks to do.It's entirely a stunt, and a cynical one at that. It's so ridiculous that even blue dog Democrats (what's left of them) are dismissing it as "all for show," and so transparently so that they don't even need to worry about Republicans weaponizing it. When even the blue dogs aren't afraid of opposing a balanced budget amendment, you know it's bullshit.
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That must have been some dishwasher.
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4 minutes ago, ShaggyBevo RIP said:
Do they already have them from Cohen and are seeing if American Media is going to give all of them over or are they implying that to see if Cohen somehow hide some of them?
I’m not sure where they’re going with this, a big part of me thinks this news about Cohen and the affair payoffs is a PR smokescreen while investigators (Mueller) focus on the really egregious shit like Russian money laundering and treas.. err ah conspiracy
Feds Seize Backpage.com
in Daily Texan
Posted
The chief executive officer of sex-solicitation website Backpage.com pleaded guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges in California three days after the site, which was also used by human traffickers, was permanently closed.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced that Carl Ferrer offered his guilty plea in state court in Sacramento and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against a pair of co-conspirators and controlling shareholders. Ferrer faces a prison sentence of up to five years.
“Human trafficking is modern-day slavery, and it is happening in our own backyard,” Becerra said in a statement Thursday. “The shutdown of Backpage.com is a tremendous victory for the survivors and their families. And the conviction of CEO Ferrer is a game-changer in combating human trafficking in California, indeed worldwide.”