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Francisco 2.0

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Francisco 2.0

  1. Or maybe they confiscated it from a mob-controlled earth moving company. Shrugs. NYPD has all sorts of shit; years ago, I was in Times Square and there was a NYPD School Truancy van. I just mentally pictured them running down some skipping jr high kids and throwing them in the back. https://www.policecarwebsite.net/fc/ny/nypd/nypddiv.html
  2. A day after Trump issued a call for more supporters to gather outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, the number reached its nadir. The number of identifiable Trump fans across the street in Collect Pond Park on Tuesday sank to the mid-single digits, after hovering at about a dozen for a week. Trump continues to receive favorable treatment from the New York City Police Department. For a week, a large N.Y.P.D. dump truck has parked in the intersection of Hogan Place and Centre Street, with a uniformed driver sitting inside. Minutes before Trump's arrival each morning, the dump truck has pulled a half-car length forward, blocking news photographers’ views of him entering the side door of the courthouse. And this afternoon, like those before it, the driver did the same maneuver for Trump’s 2:37 p.m. departure.
  3. Followup from the Times reporting of the trial: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/nyregion/national-enquirer-trump-trial-david-pecker.html?smid=url-share The National Enquirer’s help for Trump broke norms, even for a tabloid. The National Enquirer was more than a friendly media outlet for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. It was a powerful, national political weapon that was thrust into the service of a single candidate, in violation of campaign finance law. The tabloid’s former publisher, David Pecker, testified nonchalantly on Tuesday about how the tabloid operated in tandem with the Trump campaign, “catching and killing” potentially damaging stories and running elaborate and false hit pieces on Mr. Trump’s opponents. But its practices were unusual even in the wild supermarket tabloid news game. By the admission of The Enquirer’s own publisher — first made to federal prosecutors years ago during the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen — the tabloid was operating with the full intention of helping Mr. Trump’s campaign. Under the First Amendment, newspapers are permitted to support candidates. But The Enquirer’s support went beyond journalism: The publication paid $150,000 for a story a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, was preparing to tell about an affair she said she had with the candidate. Then, it published nothing. That sort of deal is not unusual in the tabloid news trade, even if it violates journalistic standards followed by mainstream American outlets like this one, which have rules against paying sources. But before 2016, there had never been a known catch-and-kill deal to aid a presidential campaign. In that context, The Enquirer’s payment violated federal campaign laws prohibiting corporations from donating to presidential candidates — who are limited to receiving direct donations of $4,400 per person — and forbidding them to coordinate election-related spending with campaigns. As The Enquirer’s parent company at the time, American Media, admitted in a “non-prosecution” deal with the federal government in 2018: “AMI knew that corporations such as AMI are subject to federal campaign finance laws, and that expenditures by corporations, made for purposes of influencing an election and in coordination with or at the request of a candidate or campaign, are unlawful.” The deal helped secure Tuesday’s testimony. (The Federal Election Commission later hit The Enquirer’s parent company with fines of $187,000; Mr. Trump’s campaign escaped sanction.) The Enquirer was also providing a hidden value to Mr. Trump: By giving over its cover to his political needs, Mr. Pecker gave him the equivalent of free advertising space at most major supermarket checkout lines in the country, where the tabloid had long ago secured prime placement. One expert said at the time that such exposure could be worth as much $3 million a month. Worth potentially even more: The Enquirer’s agreement to keep from the checkout line not only Ms. McDougal’s story but the cache of Trump dirt it had in its own files — “tabloid gold” that would never see the light of day.
  4. Honestly, who knows. This is Trump. Every one of the choices listed are normal possibilities as in they would be possible for you or I or anyone else. But again, this is Trump. These are uncharted waters and behavior not only of him, an entire political party and 1/3 to 1/2 of the electorate. Those three factors, together, makes nearly anything a possiblity.
  5. NYTimes website. I have a sub, and they have a running narrative of the trial. They have 4 reporters in the room (Jonah Bromwich, Maggie Haberman, Kate Christobek, Michael Gold) and they each just add to the timeline. Occasionally, one of them will expound upon the reporting of another. I'm just copying/pasting; not always in chronological order. They don't update it every minute; sometimes there might be 5-10 minutes between updates. There's others who are reporting from the courtroom (or an annex) and using Twitter for their messaging. I'm not including them here. And it's a wrap for the day: We end the day without a final decision from the judge on whether Trump will be held in contempt and fined for violating his gag order. Justice Merchan could issue a written ruling at any point, or rule from the bench on Thursday or later. There is no deadline. Trump, speaking in the hallway outside the courtroom, says he thinks the gag order is unconstitutional. He’s holding a stack of printed articles that he says he’s not sure he’s allowed to share because of the gag order, which only pertains to a limited set of issues. While in the middle of talking to reporters, he says, “I’d love to talk to you people, I’d love to say anything that’s on my mind, but I’m restricted.”
  6. David Pecker tells the courtroom that he asked Dylan Howard, the former editor of The National Enquirer, to investigate Karen McDougal’s story and that he told Cohen he had done so. He seems to indicate his conversations with Cohen soon increased in frequency and the two men began to talk multiple times daily. Cohen said they should communicate over Signal, an encrypted app, which is often used for conversations that a person wants to keep private. The jury is quite alert for this portion of Pecker’s testimony. Trump’s body language changed when Pecker started testifying about the catch-and-kill deal involving McDougal. He started moving his head, squinting and pursing his lips, and then crossed his arms over his chest. Pecker says he advised Trump to purchase McDougal’s story directly. “I think you should buy it,” he recalls having said to Trump, who was then a candidate for president. He says Trump said he’d think about it and have Cohen call Pecker back. McDougal, by the way, was selling a story of having had an affair with Trump. Pecker concluded the day’s testimony by saying that Michael Cohen was becoming increasingly agitated as The National Enquirer editor, Dylan Howard, traveled to hear McDougal’s story. “It looked like he was getting a lot of pressure to get the answer, like, right away,” Pecker says of Cohen at the time.
  7. We are fifteen minutes — at most — away from the end of the day. Steinglass, the prosecutor, appears to be putting a bow on the story of the doorman who sought to sell Trump’s story. But he moves on immediately to the second catch-and-kill deal, which involved the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. She, too, had story about Trump to sell. Prosecutors like to end the day with the most intriguing question-and-answer series they can. I’d expected Steinglass to finish with the doorman, and perhaps allow the jurors to leave early. But by moving onto this next deal, he could be setting up a nice cliffhanger to leave jurors with, that he'll pick back up when we return Thursday morning.
  8. Steinglass, the prosecutor, is asking Pecker why he paid so much for this story. “I made the decision to buy the story because of the potential embarrassment it would have to the campaign and Mr. Trump,” Pecker responds. This is catch-and-kill in a nutshell and Pecker just said several times in different ways that he was acting on Trump’s behalf.
  9. Regardless of whether the allegation about Trump fathering the child was true or not, the jury is now being shown a contract the National Enquirer reached with Dino Sajudin, the doorman, in which the words “Donald Trump’s illegitimate child” feature prominently. Things like that can leave a mark.
  10. And we are back after a break Pecker says Cohen called him furiously denying that the child in question was Trump's, saying that he offered to take a DNA test and that because he was German-Irish and the woman was Hispanic, it was impossible for the child to be his. To be clear, Pecker appeared to be saying that Cohen indicated that a child with a Hispanic mother couldn’t be Trump’s. Trump has often talked about “good genes” and blood lines. While running for president, he has denigrated immigrants from Latin American countries and said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Pecker is now being asked about Dino Sajudin, a doorman who worked at a Trump building and looked to sell a story — which was apparently false — about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock. This is the first of three catch-and-kill deals that Pecker is expected to describe and we will likely get a fair amount of detail on each of them. This story clearly bothers Trump. Just like yesterday when it came up during opening statements, he frowned and shook his head. Pecker says the love child story would have been a big story, and he believed it was important to have it “removed from the market.” Cohen told him “the boss would be very pleased.”
  11. So, we are 2 hours or so into some testimony, from one witness. And it's not going well for Trump. Cross will be interesting, of course, but really, I don't think they will be able to refute much, if anything that Pecker has testifed to already. Is there any wonder why his counsel kept stalling and delaying as much as possible? Imagine, if we ever get a chance, what a federal trial will be like for Trump.
  12. Trump pulls down the lapels of his jacket sharply and walks out, again looking frustrated. To me, he’s looked far angrier yesterday and today than he did during all of last week, during jury selection.
  13. Trump’s lawyers have objected all along to prosecutors couching Trump’s relationship with Pecker and Michael Cohen as a conspiracy — after all, Trump is not facing a conspiracy charge. But Joshua Steinglass, one of the prosecutors, just noted for the first time in court that one of the election statutes the case is based on does in fact have a conspiracy provision. That could prove important later when the jury is instructed on the laws they must consider in reaching a verdict.
  14. Pecker is now being asked about being introduced to Steve Bannon, Trump's top strategist, in October 2016. He recalls Trump saying, “I believe you and Steve would get along really well.” It’s worth recalling that this happened around the same time as the Wikileaks email dump, after a hack of Clinton’s top adviser John Podesta’s account, and the Trump team used that material frequently. We are taking a short break. From our perspective, it seemed as if the jurors needed it. A few looked like they were flagging. We have no lunch break today — usually it’d be about a half hour away — and this is a lot of information to absorb. Jurors often feel a special responsibility to understand what they’re being told, given their role. It can be very tiring, regardless of the subject matter.
  15. Pecker is now being asked about being introduced to Steve Bannon, Trump's top strategist, in October 2016. He recalls Trump saying, “I believe you and Steve would get along really well.” Pecker is being asked about an infamous Enquirer story linking Ted Cruz’s father to the John F. Kennedy assassination. He says it originated with Dylan Howard, The Enquirer's editor. Pecker said that after the Republican debates, Cohen would call him and direct him to focus the negative coverage on whichever candidate had been most successful onstage. It should be pointed out that Pecker’s testimony isn’t just damaging to Trump. He is, in effect, laying waste to his own professional career by going through headline after headline and suggesting he attacked Trump’s rivals to aid Trump.
  16. Pecker is asked about the nature of Cohen’s relationship to the Trump campaign. Pecker says Cohen always said he didn’t work for the campaign, and that he was instead “Mr. Trump’s personal attorney.” But jurors just heard that Cohen was central to feeding the tabloid negative information about campaign opponents. “Michael was physically in every aspect of whatever the campaign was working on,” Pecker says. He adds that because Cohen wasn’t officially employed by the campaign, he may have heard things “informally” or “injected himself into it.” Pecker finally says something mildly helpful to the defense. He says he doesn’t know who Cohen spoke to, and adds that Cohen may have essentially been freelancing, acting of his own volition as he tried to get more involved with the campaign. Now, we are discussing negative headlines attacking three of Trump's Republican opponents in 2016, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, which prosecutors argue illustrate the outcome of the agreement reached during the Trump Tower meeting. Pecker says that Cohen would feed him negative information and that The National Enquirer would “embellish” and add onto it. Trump jumped on the negative coverage of Ted Cruz, especially about his father, in 2016. The campaign promoted it like it had come about organically and Trump was simply responding to it. Trump just leaned in toward the monitor in front of him and squinted to look closer at a collection of headlines from The National Enquirer that praised him. They included: “Donald Trump — Cruzin to victory! Ted endorses Donald” and “Obama’s Half Brother — Cheering on Donald at Debate.”
  17. Pecker asked that the "catch-and-kill" arrangement be kept secret. Steinglass asks him to explain why. Pecker says he was helping the campaign, and didn’t want it to “leak” that his publication was aiding Trump. He wanted it “very confidential,” he says. Steinglass, satisfied, moves on.
  18. It remains striking how calm Pecker is. The testimony he’s offering is really, really bad for a very, very powerful man who is sitting in this courtroom. Pecker seems unfazed. It’s fascinating watching Pecker talk directly to the jurors. Some, but not all, are watching him. Pecker repeats that “writing positive stories about Mr. Trump and covering the election, and writing negative stories about his opponents” helped them both, increasing tabloid newsstand sales while benefitting the Trump campaign. Steinglass then makes him clarify that suppressing negative news about Trump only benefitted the candidate, not the tabloid. Pecker agrees. Asked about Trump’s reaction to the stories, Pecker says, “he was pleased.” He says that Michael Cohen was also pleased about “the way I was going to handle these issues.” Recall that Blanche, in his opening statement, tried to convince the jury that Trump’s relationship with Pecker was par for the course in the world of journalism. But a naked appeal by a political candidate to a magazine publisher “to help the campaign” is not normal. Pecker suggests that since these stories were popular, there was a “mutual benefit” to running them — it would help Trump’s campaign, he says, and “it would also help me.” Earlier, we noted that Pecker and Trump had a symbiotic relationship, scratching each other’s back. Pecker just testified that the arrangement continued during the campaign.
  19. Pecker is asked if Bill and Hillary Clinton’s names came up in the meeting. Pecker says that when you run a magazine, you have to choose the topic of the week. Coverage of Hillary Clinton running for president that described Bill Clinton as “a womanizer” was a big seller, he says. “I was running the Hillary Clinton stories, I was running Hillary as an enabler for Bill Clinton, with respect to all the womanizing.” As expected, Pecker is describing himself as the agent of “catch-and-kill” schemes in which he or others would help Cohen suppress negative information about Trump, specifically negative information pertaining to “women selling stories.” Pecker is, in essence, confessing to promoting “fake news” on behalf of Donald Trump. Pecker says he had expected “there would be a lot of women who would come out to try to sell their stories” about Trump, because he was known as “the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women.” (Trump married his current wife, Melania, in 2005.) The jurors are being shown their first exhibit, an email sent to Pecker inviting him to Trump's campaign announcement at Trump Tower. They are paying close attention. Steinglass is now drilling down on the key meeting in what prosecutors say was a conspiracy — an August 2015 gathering between Trump, Cohen and Pecker. “I received a call from Michael Cohen telling me that the boss wanted to see me,” Pecker says. Pecker says he didn’t know the purpose of the meeting before he arrived. When he got there, he says, Cohen and Trump asked him what he and his magazines could do “to help the campaign,” a quote that will be key to prosecutors' argument that the hush money payments were made to help Trump win the election.
  20. You can see Steinglass, the prosecutor, gently leading the jury step-by-step into the bizarre world of Trump’s relationship with Pecker’s supermarket tabloid empire. This line of questioning will soon get to the heart of the issue: the “catch-and-kill” operations that Pecker launched to aid Trump’s political ambitions. Pecker says that Trump was “viewed as the boss.” Prosecutors are using him to establish two things: that Trump was a “micro-manager,” particuarly with money, and that he often delegated point people for others to deal with. Pecker says that his was Michael Cohen.
  21. Note: I gotta say; all this shit about Trump being frugal is just fucking hilarious. .. Steinglass asks Pecker about Hope Hicks, another intermediary for Trump. He is slowly weaving Pecker into Trump’s world, through his connections with people who will come up again at this trial. Because he is the first witness, this serves as an introduction to the fuller cast of characters, whose names the jury may already be familiar with. Trump has been watching Pecker’s testimony but appears to perk up when certain people are mentioned, like Hicks, his former spokeswoman, or Ivanka Trump, his older daughter. Overall, Pecker’s affect as a witness is calm, understated, almost grandfatherly. If he holds up this way under cross-examination, that could help him bolster his credibility with the jury. Pecker is now describing what he calls his first meeting with Michael Cohen, in 2007. He says Trump introduced them at his office, and that he was told to route all communications to Trump through Cohen. “He was very cautious and very frugal,” Pecker says of Trump’s approach to money. Any testimony from Pecker that establishes Trump’s track record of keeping a close eye on his own finances — “almost a micromanager,” in Pecker’s words — will help the prosecution prove its core accusation: that the former president falsified records to cover up a sex scandal.
  22. Pecker is describing a symbiotic relationship between Trump and The National Enquirer centered in part around “The Apprentice.” Pecker says that Trump would tip him off first as to who was going to be fired — “or eliminated,” as Pecker puts it — from the show, and The Enquirer would write about it. Trump’s history of tipping off the New York City tabloids about his own life was legendary well before The Apprentice. Prosecutors are working to situate Pecker in Trump’s orbit before the jury. He’s not coming across as a combative witness, but, on the contrary, as a longtime fan, friend and ally of Trump. If he testifies, as we expect, about a series of hush money deals they arranged together, this gentle impression will help make him all the more credible. If anything, Pecker is appearing like the kind of person who the Trump campaign, in another context, would ask to serve a validator for Trump’s past successes.
  23. Steinglass is now asking about “The Apprentice,” which Pecker calls “an instant success.” Pecker says that he’s had “a great relationship with Mr. Trump over the years,” and that he launched a magazine with him called Trump Style. When he proposed the magazine, Pecker says, Trump’s biggest question was, “Who’s going to pay for it?” Pecker never did say who paid for it. Pecker is being asked to point to and identify Trump, who he says he’s known since the late 1980s. They met at Mar-a-Lago, he says. Pecker specifically says he was introduced to him through Nick Ribis, then a casinos executive for Trump and, until the early 2000s, one of his long-serving lawyers. As Pecker identified the former president, Trump lifted his head and smiled tightly.
  24. It does not appear as if we will get a ruling from the judge right now on whether or not Trump will be held in contempt and fined. David Pecker has entered the courtroom in a dark grey suit and made his way to the witness stand. Trumps shifted in his chair as Pecker passed.
  25. Justice Merchan has repeatedly pushed Todd Blanche to clarify his arguments, only to have Blanche deny that he is saying what he seems to be saying. Trump is very lucky that the jurors are not here for this. Merchan is really dressing down Blanche right now. “You’ve presented nothing,” Merchan just said to Blanche, who has been presenting his argument for some 20 minutes. It's devastating for Blanche. Trump is growing more animated as Justice Merchan pushes back on Blanche. On several occasions while the judge was speaking, the former president sharply turned to his other lawyers at the defense table and whispered to them. Justice Merchan is now pushing Todd Blanche to do a forensic accounting of how reposts happen in Trump’s world. “It’s not passive,” the judge finally says. What’s interesting here is the throughline between Blanche’s argument that there is distance between Trump and his own reposts and the prosecution's argument against Trump, which is that he repeatedly used others — Michael Cohen, The National Enquirer — to do his dirty work. This line of questioning is highlighting a longtime Twitter catchphrase -- that "retweets do not equal endorsements." When you are a former president sitting on trial, it would seem your reposts do carry more weight, particularly in light of this court’s gag order. Todd Blanche says Trump is entitled to complain about “two systems of justice.” “There’s two systems of justice in this courtroom? That’s what you’re saying?” Justice Merchan says. There’s a real similarity between the opening statements we saw yesterday and the arguments about the alleged gag order violations today: Again, prosecutors have an overarching narrative, saying that Trump willfully violated their order. Blanche is responding to the allegations one by one, and the judge, for now, isn’t having it. Justice Merchan is basically taking on, one by one, Trump's favored social media strategies. One is constantly claiming something was “just found.” In this particular case, the subject was Stormy Daniels’ early 2018 statement denying having had a sexual encounter with Trump, which she has since disavowed. “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND!” Trump said in an April 10 Truth Social post. “I need to know what is true,” Justice Merchan says. The judge loses patience with Todd Blanche, Trump's lawyer. “I’m asking the questions, OK,” he says. “Im going to decide whether your client is in contempt or not, so please don’t turn it around.” Blanche says in a higher-pitched voice that the prosecutors got as much time as they want. Justice Merchan makes a distinction, saying the prosecutors were answering his questions. During the scold, Trump turned to another one of his lawyers, Emil Bove, and whispered a comment. We’ll try to decode Todd Blanche’s attacks further, though they are confusing even in the room. He says that a post from Michael Avenatti, which caused Trump to launch into an attack on Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, was a political argument, about speech not in the case but on social media and in interviews. Thus, Blanche is saying, Trump’s response is not in fact an attack on witnesses but a continuation of that political discussion. This is a hard pill for Justice Merchan to swallow, clearly. The legal and political strategies by the Trump team have been intertwined since the first indictment. And Blanche’s argument brings that into stark relief. It’s fascinating to see a lawyer for Trump try to separate out politics from legal proceedings. The Trump era, of course, has been marked by the opposite sort of context collapse: With Trump, everything is politics. That’s why this argument may not work.
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