View from the Left: Avenatti's forecast for Trump gets even stormier—he won't serve out his term
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Several weeks ago, when Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti was delighting in Donald Trump finally breaking his silence on the $130,000 hush-money payment executed by Michael Cohen, Avenatti made the point that Cohen was about to come under intense preView from the Left: Avenatti's forecast for Trump gets even stormier—he won't serve out his term
Several weeks ago, when Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti was delighting in Donald Trump finally breaking his silence on the $130,000 hush-money payment executed by Michael Cohen, Avenatti made the point that Cohen was about to come under intense pressure as the lynchpin in both the Stormy saga and the Russia probe. «If this guy doesn't hold up ultimately,» he observed, «very bad things are going to happen to this administration.» That was the Thursday before the FBI's no-knock raid of Cohen's office and residences that have infinitely increased Donald Trump's legal jeopardy—expanding it beyond the Russia/election probe and into at least a decade of Trump's seedy business dealings. In other words, Avenatti predicted Trump's fate was about to lie in the hands of Cohen days in advance of the raid that has indeed initiated a tectonic shift in the forces bearing down on Trump's presidency and, now, also the family business that bears his name. After a year of cascading stories claiming that «All roads lead to...» Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort—the Cohen prophesy now stands apart for being manifestly true. And on Thursday of this week, Avenatti leveled another forecast while appearing on MSNBC's Deadline: «I do not believe this president will serve out his term—that's how serious I think this is.» «This» appeared to refer to Trump's entanglement with his own client, Daniels. But let's face it, the more tantalizing part of his declaration came before the em dash. The commingling of the Daniels case, which is a civil proceeding, with the criminal investigation that is now advancing in the Southern District of New York, makes it sometimes difficult for non-lawyers (myself included) to track them and their relevance to each other. That legal haze was only made more murky this week by yet another civil proceeding with yet another alleged Trump mistress, who made news when she was freed from a contract that was also intended to silence her, much like Daniels. Where the civil proceedings of Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal meet up with the criminal investigation led by federal prosecutors in New York is that the payments to them provided at least part of the impetus for authorities to search Cohen's premises. But the two civil cases also took sharp turns away each other this week based on the lawyers handling them and presumably the goals of their clients. McDougal sought to be released from a contract with the parent company of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc. (AMI), that prevented her from telling her story to other outlets. AMI had originally threatened to fight McDougal's lawsuit but, following the Cohen raid, decided settling would be the smarter move rather than going through the process of pre-trial discovery (which could have gotten sticky for Trump, Cohen, and AMI). There's been some debate about whether McDougal got the best possible deal given the leverage she had following the Cohen raid, but ultimately she isn't under AMI's thumb anymore and that seemed to be her primary goal. Daniels and her lawyer Avenatti, on the other hand, appear to be on a take-no-prisoners mission aimed straight at the Oval Office. When Daniels made an appearance this week outside the New York courthouse where Cohen and his lawyers were battling the criminal case, she put them on notice. Read more