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michael avenatti
As Cohen Tries to Tear Up NDA, Stormy Daniels' Attorney Claims He's "Back to Doing Trump's Bidding"
Michael Avenatti says he believes "Cohen is playing a game in an attempt to avoid his deposition and that of Mr. Trump."
Sep 08, 2018
Michael Avenatti, the attorney of adult film star Stormy Daniels--who was paid hush money ahead of the 2016 election to keep quiet about an alleged affair with then-candidate Donald Trump--is claiming that longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who recently pleaded guilty to arranging the payment, "is back to doing Trump's bidding and acting as a fixer."
CNNrevealed Friday that Essential Consultants, the shell company that Cohen set up to pay off Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford), had filed a status report "agreeing to tear up the original 2016 agreement...in which Cohen arranged to pay her $130,000 to stay silent," and requested that Daniels return the money.
Avenatti, who has become a regular on cable news because of the lawsuits for which he is representing Daniels, discussed the development on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" Friday evening, and posited that "Cohen is playing a game in an attempt to avoid his deposition and that of Mr. Trump."
In a pair of tweets after the interview, Avenatti called Cohen's move "a political stunt," and vowed that he and Daniels "will never settle the cases absent full disclosure and accountability."
\u201cMichael Cohen is back to playing games and trying to protect Donald Trump. He is now pulling a legal stunt to try and \u201cfix it\u201d so that we can\u2019t depose Trump and present evidence to the American people about what happened. He is not a hero nor a patriot. He deserves what he gets.\u201d— Michael Avenatti (@Michael Avenatti) 1536371869
\u201cLet me be clear - my client and I will never settle the cases absent full disclosure and accountability. We are committed to the truth. And we are committed to delivering it to the American people. #Basta\u201d— Michael Avenatti (@Michael Avenatti) 1536377242
Cohen provoked ire from Trump last month when he pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts and implicated the president--admitting in federal court that he violated campaign finance law "at the direction" of then-candidate Trump "for the principal purpose of influencing the election." The campaign finance violations relate to Cohen facilitating hush-money payments to Daniels as well as former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also says she had an affair with Trump.
Cohen, who toldABC News in July that his loyalty is to "family and country" over Trump, also has been sharply ridiculed for a GoFundMe page called the "Michael Cohen Truth Fund," which was set up by his lawyer Lanny Davis after Cohen's plea, in hopes of covering his legal fees.
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Stormy Daniels, Trump and the Power of Telling the Truth
In the face of withering personal attacks from men at the highest levels of government, Stormy refused to back down. Because she knew she was right
Aug 24, 2018
The person we have to thank for the Michael Cohen plea story -- the impresario of the entire stunning production -- is Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actor known as Stormy Daniels.
Hers is a quintessentially American story. She's the outsider, the object of disdain, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the star without the veneer of refinement -- and the player in this drama who's winning because she's the one telling the truth. In the face of withering personal attacks from men at the highest levels of government, Stormy refused to back down. Because she knew she was right.
It's no surprise that so many people are rooting for her.
She's the outsider, the object of disdain, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the star without the veneer of refinement -- and the player in this drama who's winning.
On Tuesday, Cohen admitted to not just tax and bank fraud but campaign finance violations. More than that, President Donald Trump's longtime consigliere said he committed the campaign-related crimes at the direction of his boss. But Clifford's lawsuits helped alert prosecutors early on to the facts underlying some of Cohen's misdeeds, to say nothing of the president's.
Just before the 2016 presidential election, Cohen arranged for a $130,000 payment to Clifford so that she would not reveal her affair with Trump. At the time of this alleged affair, Trump's wife Melania had recently given birth to the couple's son Barron. There were big penalties if Clifford breached the agreement. Yet when news of the deal broke at the beginning of this year, she decided to go on the offensive.
Her lawyer -- Los Angeles litigator Michael Avenatti, who has a chiseled face and a flair for promotion and whose hobby is driving race cars -- accused both Michael Cohen and Trump of defamation. He has proved more than a match for Trump at trolling his opponents.
Clifford and Avenatti launched three -- count 'em, three -- lawsuits against Cohen and Trump: claiming that the agreement wasn't valid, that Cohen and Trump had intimidated her into signing it and that they were lying when they denied her tryst with Trump.
Avenatti also launched a massive publicity campaign against Cohen and Trump. You simply could not turn on a TV news show without seeing Avenatti at the table. The campaign got under Cohen's skin so effectively that he actually went to court to try to get a restraining order to "stop the media circus." Avenatti, for his part, predicted on TV that Cohen would eventually turn on Trump.
And Avenatti was right: Cohen has definitely turned on Trump, While the Cohen plea's legal implications for the president aren't yet clear, the combination of the plea with the conviction on the same afternoon of Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was what the Drudge Report called "Trump Hell Hour."
\u201cDrudge is calling this "TRUMP HELL HOUR"\u201d— Brian Stelter (@Brian Stelter) 1534886431
More than that, Cohen's plea has set loose a wave of support for Clifford, from the high-minded ("you are now part of American history writ large") to the not-so-much ("you go, girl"). One online image features a cartoon of Snoopy sitting at his typewriter in his familiar author's posture on his doghouse composing this text: "...And then, America was saved by a Porn Star. THE END."
Some of the enthusiasm may be due to Avenatti, a lawyer who, for all his shortcomings, is a genuine phenomenon. A ferociously combative litigator, Avenatti has been willing to batter Trump and Cohen using the forums and the language they understand. In the wake of Cohen's plea, Avenatti gives every indication that he's going to keep on pursuing his reality-show strategy. ("Buckle up, Buttercup," he warned Rudy Giuliani, Trump's attorney, on Twitter.)
\u201c.@RudyGiuliani Buckle Up Buttercup. You and your client completely misplayed this...\u201d— Michael Avenatti (@Michael Avenatti) 1534876229
But it was Clifford who hung on through the unrelenting assaults from Cohen and Giuliani as well as the chief peril of any piece of substantial litigation -- the absence of a sure source of money. Indeed, there is evidence that because of her resistance to Cohen and Trump, she was targeted for an unlawful prostitution arrest.
Trump presents himself as the owner of gilded bathrooms and -- as Giuliani said of Trump's three wives -- "beautiful women, classy woman, women of great substance."
Clifford gives the lie to this kind of pretension. She may come from another world, one that's perhaps less delicate in Trump and Giuliani's eyes -- but in the end, she had the most substance of them all.
\u201cHow ya like me now?! # teamstormy\u201d— Stormy Daniels (@Stormy Daniels) 1534894546
It's the ultimate American affirmation of the underdog. Or, as #teamstormy tweeted, "How ya like me now?"
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'This Is About the Cover-Up': Stormy Daniels Details Affair With Trump and What Followed
Years before the president's lawyer made a $130,000 payment to Daniels ahead of the election, the actress was threatened with physical harm after speaking to a magazine about her relationship with Trump
Mar 25, 2018
"This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb. It is thuggish behavior from people in power. And it has no place in American democracy."
--Michael Avenatti, attorney
In a long-awaited interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, adult film star Stormy Daniels detailed a brief sexual relationship she says she had with President Donald Trump and potentially-illegal efforts and threats made by Trump and his associates to keep her quiet about the affair.
Five years after Daniels's single sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, she was offered $15,000 to tell her story to In Touch magazine. The story never ran because Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, threatened legal action against the publication--and weeks later, Daniels was threatened with physical harm by someone she had never met.
\u201cNot long after the magazine story was killed, Stormy Daniels says she was threatened by a man who approached her in Las Vegas. \u201cA guy walked up on me and said to me, \u2018leave Trump alone. Forget the story.\u2019\u201d\u201d— 60 Minutes (@60 Minutes) 1522021831
"I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter," she told Anderson Cooper. "And a guy walked up on me and said to me, 'Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.' And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, 'That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.' And then he was gone."
The encounter left Daniels shaken. She said it caused her to deny that the affair took place when a gossip website published a story about it later that year, and when various outlets offered her money to go public when Trump announced his run for president, she refused.
Daniels said she was later relieved to be offered $130,000 by Trump's lawyer in October 2016, just before the presidential election, in order to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) promising to keep quiet about the story.
"I turned down a large payday multiple times...I didn't wanna take away from the legitimate and legal, I'd like to point out, career that I've worked very hard to establish. I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she's being exposed to right now," she said.
After the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell story alleging her affair with Trump this past January, Daniels said she was again pressured by Trump's team to deny that it had ever happened. Daniels also says she was warned "they" could make her "life hell in many different ways," if she didn't sign a statement refuting the Journal's story.
"I felt intimidated and honestly bullied," said Daniels. "And I didn't know what to do. And so I signed it."
"This is about the cover-up," said Daniels's attorney, Michael Avenatti, in the "60 Minutes" segment. "This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb. It is thuggish behavior from people in power. And it has no place in American democracy."
Former FEC chairman Trevor Potter noted that Daniels's story is also about the $130,000 payment made to Daniels just before the election. Cohen has claimed the money came from his personal funds and that he paid it due to his concern for Trump, and not to influence the election. Avenatti calls the claim "laughable," while Potter and watchdog groups argue that the payment could still be a major ethics violation.
"It's a $130,000 in-kind contribution by Cohen to the Trump campaign, which is about $126,500 above what he's allowed to give," said Potter, now president of the Campaign Legal Center. "And if he does this on behalf of his client, the candidate, that is a coordinated, illegal, in-kind contribution by Cohen for the purpose of influencing the election, of benefiting the candidate by keeping this secret."
Earlier this month, the Washington Postreported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating "episodes involving Michael Cohen," leading to speculation that the payment he made to Daniels could have implications for Mueller's probe of the Trump campaign.
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