Trump Trial
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
StmarysCity79
Well-Known Member
This court only convenes Mon-Thursday dummy.
HA. Now Trump has to go to the graduation of a kid he couldnt care less about.
WingsOfGold
Well-Known Member
Ahhhh the Duty Idiot has spoken!
She's like the SOMD version of the View.
Comes on every day at 11am to spout stupidity, ignorance and bile.
Michael Cohen TikTok Videos, Fundraising May Have ‘Torpedoed’ NY Trump Prosecution
Speaking with Fox News, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy called Cohen’s antics a “major problem for prosecutors.”
” It is not a problem for Cohen’s credibility because he has none — he is a convicted perjurer and fraudster whose current ‘defense’ of his fraud convictions is that he wasn’t telling the truth when he pled guilty,” said McCarthy.
Even disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti lamented that Cohen may have destroyed the prosecution’s case.
“Michael Cohen through his narcissism and his ego may have just torpedoed the case against Trump,” Avenatti told Fox News from federal prison.
“Never underestimate this guy’s ability to screw something up due to his ignorance and arrogance. He’s dumber than a box of rocks. The state can’t win the case without him and because of his conduct in reviewing trial testimony in violation of the court’s order, which [he] just admitted to when speaking with ABC, the court must strike him as a witness, declare a mistrial, or both,” Avenatti continued. “He had no business commenting on other witnesses’ testimony.”
Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson concurred that Cohen’s behavior may prove costly.
“Profiting off the trial adds another conflict to that pile. Whether it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back when it comes to the jury remains to be seen, but it certainly is fodder for cross-examination,” Jacobson told Fox News/
Late yesterday, the UK Daily Mail ran a story summarizing the tenth day of President Trump’s criminal trial for mischaracterizing legal expenses, headlined “Donald Trump trial LIVE: Ex-president delivers pizzas to the FDNY after claiming he can't testify because of the gag order.”
As the trial reports trickle out, we begin to perceive a developing prosecutorial disaster. Prosperously shaped prosecutor Alvin Bragg started off with a tepid and flimsy premise. His witnesses are no better: each one some new and more colorful kind of character, and all of them prone to lying and exaggeration. The evidence, if you can call it that, is disorganized and if anything, mostly helpful to the defendant, President Trump.
Prosecutorial star witness and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was called to the stand and immediately wrecked the trial train. Cohen is not exactly your typical lawyer. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and tax evasion and served time in prison. In March, a federal judge refused to terminate his supervised release conditions, after Cohen “accidentally” filed an AI-generated motion citing three made-up cases. He seems much more clever than smart.
Among other peculiar, non-lawyerly aspects of his personality, the jury learned that Cohen had a very bad habit of secretly recording most of his conversations with his clients (and lots of other people), which shatters nearly every rule of ethics on the books. His cell phone was packed with nearly 40,000 contacts, presumably only his very best friends.
The prosecution bookended Cohen’s testimony with that of Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, who might even be a bigger and more disgraceful example of an attorney than Cohen. California attorney Keith Davidson represented the Daniels in 2018, as part of a neat little niche practice he’s developed of representing adult performers, having also lawyered for Playboy “models” Karen McDougal and Shera Bechard. Stormy turned around and sued her lawyer Keith, for allegedly conspiring against her, the client, with the previously-mentioned disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen, which led to Keith’s own bar license being suspended for three months in 2021.
The sordid picture that emerged between the two scheming lawyers’ testimony seems more than anything to help President Trump, who is starting to look more and more like the victim of a con rather than a presidential criminal meriting historic prosecution. For example, one of Cohen’s secret recordings played for the jury this week was a conversation between the lawyers, Cohen and Davidson. In the audio, Cohen whined to Davidson about Trump never understanding why he had to pay for the NDAs:
In addition to showing Trump’s obvious distaste toward the whole enterprise, Cohen’s recording also showed a shocking lack of familiarity with ethical rules about keeping the lawyer’s discussions with his client confidential. There was Cohen, blabbing about what he and Trump said, to the lawyer on the other side.
The jury also learned why Cohen flipped on Trump and now hates him so much: bizarrely, the disbarred lawyer expected a political appointment after Trump got elected, even thinking he somehow might become Attorney General. And Cohen thinks Trump stiffed him on the $130,000 NDA payment, which makes the District Attorney’s case even murkier and more confusing, since it seems to suggest that Trump may not have even paid for the NDAs at all.
Lawyer Davidson testified that in December 2016, Michael Cohen called, obviously “very despondent and saddened.” According to Davidson, Cohen “said something to the effect of ‘[Profanity], can you f-ing believe I’m not going to Washington after everything I’ve done for that f-ing guy.”
Davidson also remembered Cohen saying “I can’t believe I’m not going to Washington. I’ve saved that guy’s a** so many times you don’t even know.”
Then Davidson testified that, on the same call, Cohen said “That f-ing guy's not even paid me the $130,000 back” — meaning the payment to Stormy Daniels that Cohen allegedly advanced.
In other words, one of the reasons Cohen hates Trump so much is because Trump never actually paid for the Stormy Daniels money. This evidence would seem to greatly complicate Alvin Bragg’s case. Good luck proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump ever paid the so-called “hush money” rather than “legal expenses.”
As far as I can tell, things got even better for Trump and worse for Alvin. While he was representing Stormy Daniels in the NDA negotiation in 2018, lawyer Davidson drafted a letter that Daniels signed, denying that here was ever any romantic affair between her and Trump. The prosecutors pressed Davidson to say the statement was false, but Davidson denied it, first seeming to admit that there really was no affair between Trump and Daniels, as Trump has long insisted:
So the jury just heard the lawyer who sold Daniels’ NDA to Trump admit that Daniels might have been lying about the affair the whole time. Later, with help from Bragg’s prosecutors, Daniels walked that admission back, but only by engaging in tortured, Clintonesque word-parsing, somehow arguing that the Daniels letter denying the affair could be considered true, but at the same time there was also an affair, because it all depends on how you characterize the relationship.
According to reports, that part of Davidson’s testimony provoked guffaws from the gallery.
But apart from the humor and lawyer hi-jinx, a truly troubling pattern emerged.
Under questioning from Trump’s lawyers, Davidson admitted that he’d approached many other celebrities, and sold them NDA’s like the one he sold to Trump, to keep the unflattering details out of the tabloids and gossip websites. In some cases, even though the pressured celebrities paid for the NDA’s, the details leaked out in various places anyway.
Just like how Stormy Daniels broke her NDA with Trump.
For example, Davidson admitted being involved in deals around actress Lindsey Lohan's rehab, a sex tape involving TV star Tina Tequila, a Hulk Hogan sex tape, something with boxer Manny Pacquiao, and with actor Charlie Sheen. Trump’s lawyers started using the word ‘extortion’ to describe Davidson’s burgeoning NDA-selling practice (which Davidson strenuously disagreed with).
Of course, this kind of thing absolutely is extortion, and finding out how common it is raises a lot of sympathy for celebrities, politicians, and other people in the public eye. How many crooked lawyers like Davidson are running around scraping up unethical people to invent some kind of barely credible-sounding story defaming a famous person?
Presumably it’s easier for the celebrity to just pay for an NDA, rather than pay a public relations firm to litigate the scandal in the courts and the media, and risk real damage to their public persona. I could see advising someone to take that deal. But it must be extremely frustrating.
Now we can understand why Stormy Daniels only got $130,000 for her story and not a million. It was nuisance money.
The trial is not being broadcast, so all we have to go on is what is reported by people attending in the gallery. But from yesterday’s reports, it seems like the evidence is developing well for the former President. So far, Alvin Bragg only has a creative, novel legal theory about check stubs, a pornographic actress, a crooked tabloid publisher, and a pair of scheming, not-too-smart, extortionist lawyers.
I won’t even try to predict what the jury might do, but this is absolutely not a good look for a trial that is supposed to represent the pinnacle of legal ethics and a historic first presidential prosecution.
☕️ BRAGGING ☙ Friday, May 3, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
If it's possible, the Trump trial is becoming even more bizarre, and better for the President; and Governor DeSantis signs more laws hemming in the World Economic Forum's "agenda."
www.coffeeandcovid.com
Matt reported that Davidson denied on the stand that he and his client removed the foundation for the proposition that the payment was "hush money." It was a "consideration," he insisted. “It wasn’t a payoff. And it wasn’t hush money. It was a consideration,” he testified.
Where does this leave us in this third week of this "spellbinder" of a case?
Where does this leave us in this third week of this "spellbinder" of a case?
- The 34 counts of fraud are actually not hush money
- Demanding payment was an extortive attempt to shake down Trump before the election that Trump was expected to lose
- Cohen admits he paid it, and that Trump didn't initiate the overture.
- Trump paid Cohen for legal fees, which they were
- They weren't FEC violations.
Trump Whodunnit: Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with
In a new filing Friday, Smith’s team said that the order of documents in some of the boxes of memos that were seized by the FBI from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was altered or jumbled, leaving two different chronologies: one that was digitally scanned and another the physical order in the boxes.
“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants' review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote.
Smith’s team in a footnote also conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.
“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.
EVIDENCE TAMPERING? Jack Smith Admits FBI Messed with Boxes Containing “Classified” Documents They Seized from Trump
In a motion filed late Friday, Jack Smith admitted the FBI messed with the boxes containing “classified” documents they seized from Trump and can’t be sure the order or the placement of the documents.
In a May 1 filing, Walt Nauta’s attorney claimed he had difficulty in cross-referencing materials in classified and unclassified discovery because “certain items in the seized boxes he reviewed were in a different order from where they appear in the scans of the boxes’ contents produced in discovery.”
Jack Smith in his Friday night response admitted the FBI moved the classified documents around.
According to a footnote in the motion reviewed by The Gateway Pundit, the FBI messed with the boxes containing the ‘classified’ documents they seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The DOJ previously assured the Court that the placement of classified documents as originally found had been maintained – THEY LIED!
Footnote 3: The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court. See, e.g., 4/12/24 Hearing Tr. at 65 (Government responding to the Court’s question of whether the boxes were “in their original, intact form as seized” by stating “[t]hey are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents”
The DOJ in August 2022 lied to the Court when they claimed the red, blue and yellow sheets shown in the viral photo of the classified documents indicated their classification status.
It turns out they were “slip sheets” the FBI used to replace the so-called classified documents.
The FBI admitted they messed with Trump’s documents! The FBI used cover sheets as placeholders for the classified documents.
“After the boxes were brought to WFO, the FBI created an index to correlate the documents with classification markings to codes (e.g., document “bb”) and labeled the classified cover sheets in the boxes with the codes for the seized documents. The FBI also generally replaced the handwritten sheets with classified cover sheets annotated with the index code, but regardless, any handwritten sheets that currently remain in the boxes do not represent additional classified documents—they were just not removed when the classified cover sheets with the index code were added. In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.”
Jack Smith also claimed the FBI found so many classified documents that they ran out of ‘slip sheets.’
“The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized,” Jack Smith laughably claimed.
“Yet more reason to throw out this sham prosecution,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in response to Jack Smith’s filing.
Trump Trial Judge Censors Federalist Writer, Former FEC Chairman From Testifying Key Defense Facts
Smith’s testimony could have opened the jury’s eyes to the fact that the FEC and Department of Justice deliberately chose not to charge Trump for same payment Bragg insists amounts to a felony. Yet Merchan barred him from mentioning the matter.
“That the FEC dismissed the complaint against defendant and the DOJ decided against prosecuting defendant for potential FECA violations are probative of nothing,” Merchan wrote “These matters are therefore irrelevant and defendant is precluded from eliciting testimony or introducing evidence or both.”
Merchan also prohibited Smith from mentioning “there had never been a case in which anyone had been convicted of a federal campaign finance law violation for the making of ‘hush money payments.’”
And yet he let Stormy testify about things that had nothing to do about the charges.
Judge allows Stormy Daniels to give irrelevant, salacious testimony just to humiliate Trump
For Merchan, who has largely ruled against Trump on such motions, that was enough.
He allowed the prosecutors to get into the details of the affair despite the immateriality of the evidence to any criminal theory.
Neither the NDA nor the payment to Daniels is being contested.
It is also uncontested that Trump wanted to pay to get the story (and other stories, including untrue allegations) from being published.
The value of the testimony was entirely sensational and gratuitous, yet Merchan was fine with humiliating Trump.
Daniels’ testimony was a dumpster fire in the courtroom.
The most maddening moment for the defense came at the lunch break when Merchan stated, “I agree that it would have been better if some of these things had been left unsaid.”
He then denied a motion for a mistrial basis on the testimony and blamed the defense for not objecting more.
That, of course, ignores the standing objection of the defense to Daniels even appearing, and specific objections to the broad scope allowed by the court.
Judge allows Stormy Daniels to give irrelevant, salacious testimony just to humiliate Trump
For Merchan, who has largely ruled against Trump on such motions, that was enough.
He allowed the prosecutors to get into the details of the affair despite the immateriality of the evidence to any criminal theory.
Neither the NDA nor the payment to Daniels is being contested.
It is also uncontested that Trump wanted to pay to get the story (and other stories, including untrue allegations) from being published.
The value of the testimony was entirely sensational and gratuitous, yet Merchan was fine with humiliating Trump.
Daniels’ testimony was a dumpster fire in the courtroom.
The most maddening moment for the defense came at the lunch break when Merchan stated, “I agree that it would have been better if some of these things had been left unsaid.”
He then denied a motion for a mistrial basis on the testimony and blamed the defense for not objecting more.
That, of course, ignores the standing objection of the defense to Daniels even appearing, and specific objections to the broad scope allowed by the court.
FNC’s Turley: Judge Merchan ‘Lost Control of His Courtroom’ During Stormy Daniels Testimony
Turley said:
He continued:
John Roberts said, “There seems to be no argument, Jonathan, that this was only to make Trump look like a bad guy. ”
Merchan later shirked responsibility for the clown show and blamed defense lawyers at least partly for her prejudicial testimony.
When you completely lose control of your courtroom, blame the lawyers—I guess that’s the lesson here.
Hijinx
Well-Known Member
The Judge and Bragg are using Daniels to harm Trumps Presidential campaign.
They know that her testimony is useless in this trial, but it does make Trump look bad in his run for the Presidency and that is what this trial is all about anyway. No prosecuting attorney would have presented Daniels for trial without knowing what she was going to say and having coached her on how to say it. This whole trial is a farce with a joke for a Judge, and hand picked biased jury.
What really pisses me off is that after this and the other farcical trials that have interfered with this election no one will face punishment for interfering with an American election. Just like no one faced punishment for the last farcical and illegal cheating in the last election that has put us in the sorry condition our country is now in,.
They know that her testimony is useless in this trial, but it does make Trump look bad in his run for the Presidency and that is what this trial is all about anyway. No prosecuting attorney would have presented Daniels for trial without knowing what she was going to say and having coached her on how to say it. This whole trial is a farce with a joke for a Judge, and hand picked biased jury.
What really pisses me off is that after this and the other farcical trials that have interfered with this election no one will face punishment for interfering with an American election. Just like no one faced punishment for the last farcical and illegal cheating in the last election that has put us in the sorry condition our country is now in,.