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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
This
really lays out just how insanely outmatched Trump's legal team is against some of the best prosecutors of our time.
Trump’s personal legal team now consists of just one full-time attorney—Jay Sekulow—a remarkably shallow bench for a president facing potential obstruction of justice charges and the prospect of impeachment. “As far as I can tell, Ty Cobb is the only attorney left on the Trump team with experience handling federal criminal investigations,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who has been closely following the probe. “The team is thinner than you might expect for perhaps the most important investigation of our lifetime.”
One of the most critical questions, in the wake of Dowd’s departure, is who is handling negotiations over Trump’s potential interview with Mueller. For months, Dowd had been in contact with the special counsel over the issue, which had reportedly emerged as a sticking point. Dowd was rightly worried about the president testifying under oath, given his penchant for mistruths and exaggerations. Trump, however, has publicly and privately signaled an eagerness to face Mueller. With Dowd out, it is unclear where those negotiations stand. “Cobb can’t do it because he doesn’t represent Trump personally and no one else currently on the team has any experience in this area,” noted William Jeffress, an attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case. Sekulow has reportedly tried to recruit more experienced lawyers, but none have yet signed on. Trump himself recently met with veteran Republican lawyers Emmet Flood and Theodore Olson, but both declined to take the case. Later Monday, it was reported
that Tom Buchanan and Dan Webb were the latest prominent lawyers to decline to work for Trump.
Trump’s inability to assemble or maintain an experienced legal team could prove crippling if he is forced to square off against Mueller, a fearsome federal prosecutor assisted by “16 of the best lawyers in the country.” Cobb and Dowd were the only members of the team with the relevant credentials. Sekulow rose to prominence as a conservative commentator and for his work on religious-freedom cases through his work with the American Center for Law and Justice. A team of roughly a half dozen individuals, also affiliated with the conservative nonprofit, are reported
to be working with Sekulow on Trump’s defense on a part-time basis. “You wouldn’t go to an ear and nose and throat specialist to perform heart surgery,” Bauer told me. “It is an odd notion that you just reach out and recruit lawyers that you are personally comfortable with . . . rather than select the people that have the experience and the training to address the very specific problem that you face.”
Bauer was withering when asked about the possibility that fellow New York attorney Marc Kasowitz might rejoin Trump’s team, as my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported
last week. “There is nothing I know of that qualifies Mr. Kasowitz to take something like this on except that the president knows him and has had a good experience with him in the areas in which Mr. Kasowitz does practice.”
It is incredible to imagine that the president of the United States—a billionaire—should be unable to secure proper representation. But Trump is hardly the ordinary presidential client. A tightfisted septuagenarian with an itchy Twitter finger, Trump is as infamous for stiffing contractors as he is for his mean streak—hardly winsome character traits for top-flight attorneys with their choice of assignments. “You’re kidding right?” one Washington defense lawyer spat last year when I asked about the challenges of representing Trump. “Representing this guy would be almost an impossibility. I mean I don’t know who would want to do that.”
Hours before news broke that diGenova and Toensing would not be joining his legal team, Trump tried to throw cold water on the narrative that he couldn’t find a good lawyer. “Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case . . . don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on,” he wrote Sunday on Twitter. “Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted.” But other members of the bar are skeptical. “If he says many lawyers are willing to work for him, that may only be true because we have a country with a huge number of lawyers in it,” Bauer said. “But how many of the willing ones would have the credentials and experience for the job?” Other members of the White House, after all, have had no trouble securing representation. White House counsel Donald Mc Gahn, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and erstwhile chief of staff Reince Priebus are all being represented by William Burck, for example. (Burck reportedly turned down a chance to work for the president.) Abbe Lowell, another heavy hitter, is representing Jared Kushner.
Trump, meanwhile, keeps giving prospective law firms more reasons not to work with him. “Trump’s latest tweets reflect his low opinion of lawyers which is only one reason lawyers who care about their reputation don’t want to represent him,” Jeffress told me. “He will no doubt find a lawyer eager to represent him but most lawyers are not.”
Given the sheer number of lawyers representing clients in Mueller’s probe, it is possible, too, that a small town like Washington is simply running out of white-shoe firms without conflicts. That was, after all, the reason that diGenova and Toensing ostensibly parted ways with Trump. Toensing has been representing Mark Corallo, who represented Trump’s legal team last year, before resigning in the wake of revelations about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer.
Such a prosaic explanation, however, could mask more ominous concerns. “What happened between last week, when Di Genova and Toensing were announced as joining the team, and yesterday?” mused Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Obama. “The conflict of interest issue was apparent on Tuesday, and yet we were told they were joining the team and that Mark Corallo (the person with the most significant conflict) had waived any concern. Then Dowd resigns Thursday, and yet by Sunday Di Genova and Toensing are gone, leaving the president with only two lawyers.” That strange development, Katyal posited to me, suggests that Robert Mueller may have intervened. “Diligent prosecutors, when they see a defendant doing something profoundly dangerous to their self-interest (including hiring lawyers who have conflicts), will raise it with the defendant and suggest they rethink it,” he explained. “I think it very possible that that happened here—Mueller is a scrupulous prosecutor and may have told Trump he had concerns about Trump’s own rights. If it did happen, it would strongly suggest that Mueller is formally thinking of Trump as a target of his investigation . . . A prosecutor would issue such a warning to a target, not to a witness.”
edited 26th Mar '18 5:27:13 PM by megaeliz
Apparently Republicans know what the golden bullet is to take out the blue wave - campaign against Hillary Clinton
. Full article text
Re: itchy twitter finger, it wouldn't be so funny if it wasn't true. And it's brought us some of the few bright spots of the past year, so by all means, let him keep going. (I wonder if his aides literally hid his phone to stop him from tweeting about Stormy's interview.)
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - SilaswTrump's approval (depending on the poll it's high 30s to low 40s) is almost entirely kept stable by the economy doing well and Republicans generally being Republicans and falling in line no matter what. If the former situation changes, that's where your implosion will happen.
That, or a major escalation of the Mueller investigation.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.![]()
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That's almost sad, the desperate morons.
Negative focused midterms only work if the target is the opposite party's President, this is the desperate flailing of a party that can tell that they're fucked but can't see any way to get out of their current predicament.
edited 26th Mar '18 6:44:34 PM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang
x4 Who the hell still cares about Hillary Clinton? She's become almost completely irrelevant to both Democrats and Republicans. She's the Yamcha of Democratic politicians (Her losing to Trump is pretty much the equivalent of Yamcha getting killed by that Saibaman). Also, you are trying too hard to fearmonger with the polls (And I wouldn't trust a poll from Fox News no matter how well-respected their pollsters are), Blue Ninja 0.
edited 26th Mar '18 7:07:44 PM by Wariolander
That might give the wrong impression - like, people might think that it's condemning Hillary.
Oh God! Natural light!Imagine if someone hacked Fox News to play this video
on loop.
edited 26th Mar '18 7:33:59 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Distant future nothing. She already is the Wicked Witch of the West to the USA's reactionaries. And sadly to an annoying Vocal Minority of so-called progressives.
Anyway, here's a Guardian Op-ed on Stormy Daniels and what her story says about Trump and sexual power dynamics.
Stormy Daniels has spoken. It doesn’t look good for Trump – or us
In an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Daniels told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she had a one-night stand with Donald Trump, and agreed to be paid $130,000 for her silence after a man threatened her and her daughter. According to Daniels, a man approached her in a parking lot, “and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl, it would be a shame if something happened to her mom.’”
When Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, approached her with a payoff, she agreed.
The threats sound ham-fisted and cartoonish, almost like something out of a mafia movie. But then, “ham-fisted and cartoonish” also describes Michael Cohen, many of Trump’s long-serving employees and contacts, and the president himself.
But, she said: “I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into. And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ [laugh] And I just felt like maybe – [laugh] it was sort of – I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, ‘well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’”
What a sad state of affairs, that women think that sex is something they ever “have coming” and is a “bad thing” that happens as a result of “a bad situation” rather than a fun and mutually satisfying activity. And this is a woman who negotiates sexual activity for a living – someone who is surely skilled at discussing what she will and won’t do for what price.
edited 26th Mar '18 7:34:15 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised"At the very least, our president embodies the worst of male sexual entitlement and rank misogyny. We knew that before the election, and put him in the highest office in the land anyway. What does that say about us?"
It means the most powerful voters are the sleaziest voters.
My impression from Daniels's recounting of their encounter was how extremely pathetic it was, and profoundly awkward. Like, it was framed all year as being a torrid affair, but it started with him getting spanked on his tighty-whitey garbed ass with a magazine with his own face on it, then having unprotected sex with what was, to him, a random porn star. Euuurgh. Maybe that's the point. Anderson Cooper took us underneath the hood of this story and exposed it for the sleaze it was, the attorney coverup included.
edited 26th Mar '18 7:39:55 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."We don't yet have the clearest picture what actually happened. The money was Cohen's own, and a connection, an order or a request from Trump, needs to be established. It's probable that the money came directly from Cohen, but it wasn't actually "Cohen's," to establish plausible deniability. Mueller's likely working on uncovering that as we write. The media is going to be mulling over fully formed factoids, unfortunately. Once the next round of subpoenas and arrests are made, it'll be breaking news in no time.
edited 26th Mar '18 7:47:47 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Those who worked at the Bataclan
have a listen and have a link to my discord server