Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, has been pen tapped

[Moiraine]

6 minutes ago, TheSker said:

Trump was not voted in office for his business skills.

 

"You're fired!" is not a negotiation.

 

One reason he was voted in is because he wasn't a career politician.

 

 

Many people voted for Trump because they thought he'd be good for the economy due to his success in business. I heard it constantly leading up to the election that it would be one of his strong suits.

 

Note: I think it's too early to tell if he's good for the economy. Just saying that it was one of the reasons people often claimed as why they would/did vote for him.

[TheSker]

3 minutes ago, Moiraine said:

 

 

Many people voted for Trump because they thought he'd be good for the economy due to his success in business. I heard it constantly leading up to the election that it would be one of his strong suits.

 

Note: I think it's too early to tell if he's good for the economy. Just saying that it was one of the reasons people often claimed as why they would/did vote for him.

I agree.  

 

But the economy is front and center of literally every presidential election.

[Danny Bateman]

12 minutes ago, TheSker said:

Trump was not voted in office for his business skills.

 

"You're fired!" is not a negotiation.

 

One reason he was voted in is because he wasn't a career politician.

 

I don't disagree, but that's just one of many things about him that appealed to people.

 

It's also the one that I feel is particularly fraudulent. 

[Making Chimichangas]

11 hours ago, Guy Chamberlin said:

Don't care that Donald Trump screwed a porn star while his wife was home with their new baby. He's Donald Trump.

 

Don't consider it a fraudulent campaign contribution, either. With everything Citizens's United legalized, this barely registers as outrage. 

 

But Donald Trump paid a woman $130,000 to keep her mouth shut, forgot to sign the contract, and now she's blabbing to the world. Then he recklessly threw his lawyer under the bus and opened himself up to a whole new world of legal trouble. 

 

He's a bad negotiator and a lousy businessman, and that's what I want his die-hard supporters to finally realize.

 

You know, if they didn't realize that after he went bankrupt for the fourth time...

 

 

[Landlord]

14 hours ago, knapplc said:

Good points, Guy. He can have sex with whomever he wants - don't care, as long as it's consensual.

 

 

I mean, I don't imagine it was consensual for his wife..?

[knapplc]

2 hours ago, Landlord said:

 

 

I mean, I don't imagine it was consensual for his wife..?

 

Maybe it was? I have no idea what Donald and Melania have arranged. But even if Melania didn't give her OK, Donald and Stormy are adults and can do as they please, and the only concern I have about that as a taxpayer is a philosophical idea that a man should stay true to his wife, and how his philandering may affect his honesty in other areas.

[Danny Bateman]

Oh boy, this report by Ronan Farrow does not seem like great news for Cohen. Farrow is the same guy who exposed Harvey Weinstein & more recently the former AG of NY Eric Schneiderman. IOW, Farrow does not screw around.

 

 

Quote

Last week, several news outlets obtained financial records showing that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, had used a shell company to receive payments from various firms with business before the Trump Administration. In the days since, there has been much speculation about who leaked the confidential documents, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general has launched a probe to find the source. That source, a law-enforcement official, is speaking publicly for the first time, to The New Yorker, to explain the motivation: the official had grown alarmed after being unable to find two important reports on Cohen’s financial activity in a government database. The official, worried that the information was being withheld from law enforcement, released the remaining documents.
 

The payments to Cohen that have emerged in the past week come primarily from a single document, a “suspicious-activity report” filed by First Republic Bank, where Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, L.L.C., maintained an account. The document detailed sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Cohen by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, the telecommunications giant A.T. & T., and an investment firm with ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
 

The report also refers to two previous suspicious-activity reports, or sars, that the bank had filed, which documented even larger flows of questionable money into Cohen’s account. Those two reports detail more than three million dollars in additional transactions—triple the amount in the report released last week. Which individuals or corporations were involved remains a mystery. But, according to the official who leaked the report, these sars were absent from the database maintained by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or fincen. The official, who has spent a career in law enforcement, told me, “I have never seen something pulled off the system. . . . That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”
 

Seven former government officials and other experts familiar with the Treasury Department’s fincen database expressed varying levels of concern about the missing reports. Some speculated that fincen may have restricted access to the reports due to the sensitivity of their content, which they said would be nearly unprecedented. One called the possibility “explosive.” A record-retention policy on fincen’s Web site notes that false documents or those “deemed highly sensitive” and “requiring strict limitations on access” may be transferred out of its master file. Nevertheless, a former prosecutor who spent years working with the fincen database said that she knew of no mechanism for restricting access to sars. She speculated that fincen may have taken the extraordinary step of restricting access “because of the highly sensitive nature of a potential investigation. It may be that someone reached out to fincen to ask to limit disclosure of certain sars related to an investigation, whether it was the special counsel or the Southern District of New York.” (The special counsel, Robert Mueller, is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. The Southern District is investigating Cohen, and the F.B.I. raided his office and hotel room last month.)
 

Whatever the explanation for the missing reports, the appearance that some, but not all, had been removed or restricted troubled the official who released the report last week. “Why just those two missing?” the official, who feared that the contents of those two reports might be permanently withheld, said. “That’s what alarms me the most.”

 

It appears someone may have Cohen on the hook for more than what we know about publicly.

 

The funny thing is the article goes on to explain how fast & loose Cohen played it with the payments that flowed into this account from various entities. He used it to pay his Mercedes-Benz, AT&T & American Express bills, in addition to paying for entry into expensive social clubs & cutting himself personal checks. What a dope.

[BigRedBuster]

He’s such a pleasant man.