Looks like the hush payments came from the campaign donations

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Cuddles, Aug 22, 2018.

  1. exGOPer

    exGOPer

    I don't give a shit about impeachment, I want that moron and his entire lineage dying in prison, that's justice or a stroke would do - whichever comes first.
     
    #151     Aug 29, 2018
  2. Max E.

    Max E.


    Well in that case its going to be a long 3 years for you.
     
    #152     Aug 29, 2018
  3. piezoe

    piezoe

    I am not so naive to think that interjection of facts will have any affect, so I hate myself for bothering, nevertheless,

    https://www.politico.com/blogs/unde...7/hillary-clinton-emails-subpoenas-fbi-237712
    "The FBI...obtained grand jury subpoenas related to the Blackberry e-mail accounts, which produced no responsive materials, as the requested data was outside the retention time utilized by those providers," FBI Assistant Director for the Counterintelligence Division E.W. Priestap wrote in a declaration filed Monday in federal court in Washington.

    Priestap did not provide details about the subpoenas, although he suggested they were served on AT&T Wireless and a firm it acquired, Cingular.

    The new filing doesn't make clear how extensive the use of the grand jury was in connection with the Clinton probe.

    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-...-trump-says-hillary-clinton-deleted-33000-em/
    Let’s take a look at the timeline of relevant events, according to the FBI report. (The most pertinent information is on pages 15-19 of this document.)

    Feb. 1, 2013: Clinton serves her last day as secretary of state.

    July 23, 2014: The State Department reaches an agreement with the Benghazi committee about producing records for its investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. embassy in the Libyan city.

    Oct. 28, 2014: The State Department sends an official letter to Clinton’s staff requesting "emails related to their government work." Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, and aide Cheryl Mills oversaw the review of Clinton’s email archives to produce work-related documents to the department.

    Dec. 5, 2014: Clinton’s team provides 55,000 pages of emails, or about 30,000 individual emails, to the State Department. Mills tells an employee at Platte River Networks, which managed the server, that Clinton does not need to retain any emails older than 60 days.

    March 2, 2015: The New York Times breaks the story that Clinton used a personal email account while secretary of state.

    March 4, 2015: The Benghazi committee issues a subpoena requiring Clinton to turn over all emails from her private server related to the incident in Libya.

    Between March 25-31, 2015: The Platte River Networks employee has what he calls an "oh s---" moment, realizing he did not delete Clinton’s email archive, per Mills’ December 2014 request. The employee deletes the email archive using a software called BleachBit.

    March 27, 2015: Clinton’s lawyers send a letter to the Benghazi committee saying that the State Department already has the relevant emails, as they were included in the Dec. 5, 2014, turnover.

    Trump’s timeline is correct. The congressional subpoena came on March 4, 2015, and an employee deleted the emails sometime after March 25, 2015, three weeks later.

    However, the implication — that Clinton deleted emails relevant to the subpoena in order to avoid scrutiny — is unprovable if not flat wrong.
     
    #153     Aug 29, 2018
  4. piezoe

    piezoe

    Max, your Canadian , right. So you may not be familiar with the expression "yellow journalism," a very much American institution. [​IMG] It comes from a comic Strip character, the yellow kid. In the late 1800s Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst ran competing newspapers in New York City. The "World" and the "Journal." Both papers featured a comic strip in which the yellow kid, a cheery slum dweller, was a character. Both papers, in a effort to outdo the other, played fast and loose with the truth, and this kind of journalism, which had only the most tenuous connection to the truth, became known as "yellow Journalism." Hearst's paper was by far the worst when it came to exaggerations and fictitious stories. In fact, some credit Hearst with having started the Spanish American War through his use of yellow journalism. Hearst was also known as a man who could make or break any politician. Today, Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News is the heir apparent to the nineteenth and early twentieth century tradition of yellow journalism. The purpose behind yellow journalism is of course to increase circulation and profits, or nowadays viewership and profits. Truth takes a backseat. Among the prominent news organizations today, Fox is just about the most unreliable source of News there is, an obvious exception being something like the National Enquirer, which one could argue is not a news publication at all.

     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2018
    #154     Aug 29, 2018
    vanzandt likes this.
  5. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    We just call yellow journalism, journalism in America.
     
    #155     Aug 29, 2018
  6. piezoe

    piezoe

    Ha ha. They may be in the minority, but thankfully we have some news organizations that clearly do not fit the description. Neither the New Your Times nor the Washington post would, nor would PBS. These latter organizations take great pains and pride in corroborating their stories, and carefully noting when they can't be corroborated. And we saw just recently that when the Washington post was intentionally fed a lie, they identified it as such on the front page. Considering how much news they publish, they have impeccable records and they are careful to print retractions as soon as they discover an error. The last totally fictitious story I recall being published in the NY Times was many years ago now, and when the Author was found out, he was immediately fired. His journalism career was over.
     
    #156     Aug 29, 2018
  7. Tom B

    Tom B

    Lanny Davis is more proof 2018 is year of lawyers living dangerously
    BY JONATHAN TURLEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 08/28/18

    For lawyers, it has been a year of living dangerously. The scandals swirling around Washington have left a pile of attorneys accused of false statements, leaks or other improper conduct. The latest casualty appears to be Lanny Davis, who just admitted to not only spreading a false story but then lying about being its source.

    Only recently, Davis — a Democratic stalwart who has been a close adviser to the Clintons — announced that he would represent President Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, free of charge. Davis has steered Cohen into a 180-degree turn from Trump loyalist to chief accuser. He suggested that Cohen could implicate Trump in crimes touching on obstruction, collusion and campaign-finance violations. He caused a firestorm nationally when he suggested Trump knew in advance about Russian hacking of Clinton campaign and Democratic Party emails and also approved the infamous meeting with Russian representatives in Trump Tower.

    At the same time, Davis attacked Trump and his counsel as liars, proclaiming that his defense of Cohen is powerfully simple — “it’s about truth, and the power of the truth is what Michael Cohen now has no matter what ... Mayor (Rudy) Giuliani invents for a president who's been known to lie.”

    Now, Davis has admitted that he lied, fueling allegedly false stories that have occupied national media coverage for several weeks.

    In a July CNN story, it was reported that Cohen would implicate President Trump as having advance knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting and that multiple people witnessed his briefing on it. After weeks of such reporting, Davis belatedly came forward to say that, in fact, Cohen did not have such evidence. However, when asked if he was the source of the false story, Davis expressly denied it, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation. We were not the source of the story.”

    Davis’ denial came as a surprise, since various reports pegged him as the source. Finally, last night, Davis admitted being the source of the false story on the Trump Tower briefing and lying about it when subsequently challenged; he told BuzzFeed that “I made a mistake. I did not mean to be cute.” Well, it’s a tad beyond cute.

    As counsel for Cohen, Davis could be accused of spreading not just a false story but a false account of both his and his client’s conduct — and that could put him and his law license in jeopardy. D.C. and New York ethical rules state that “In the course of representing a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a third person.” Under Rule 8.4, both jurisdictions state that a lawyer shall not “engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”

    Making things worse is that Davis’ claim about the Trump Tower meeting suggested possible criminal conduct by President Trump, his son Don Jr., and others. Worse yet, the story planted by Davis, if true, would have implicated his client, Cohen, in false statements made to Congress, since Cohen previously denied such knowledge. In other words, the story was not just false but potentially put his client in jeopardy.

    For donors on Cohen’s GoFundMe site, the admissions constitute a type of bait-and-switch. After fueling excitement about Cohen’s impact as a witness against Trump (and driving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations), Davis has destroyed the credibility of the man he claimed would “reset his life” and try to “tell the truth.”

    For its part, CNN is sticking to the story, suggesting it has other sources stating that "Cohen claims Trump knew in advance of 2016 Trump Tower meeting” -- even though Cohen now states (as he did before Congress) that he has no such knowledge.

    Davis is a cautionary tale for lawyers serving multiple roles in scandals. He is a long-standing Democratic figure in Washington scandals, advising a range of clients — including the Clintons — on how to navigate through controversy. He is smart, affable, well-connected. However, he straddles the murky line between lawyer and media flak, a dual role that is highly valued but dangerously blurs what should be bright lines of representation. And the key about spinning stories is not to become the story.

    Davis is not alone; the Trump team has shown just how difficult that role can be. Cohen himself was infamous for his ham-handed and ultimately disastrous public statements. Then there are Marc Kasowitz, John Dowd, Jay Sekulow and Rudy Giuliani — all accused of varying false or misleading statements in public defenses.

    It is not clear if Davis is saying he made up the story or whether Cohen gave him the allegedly false account of being in a room with other witnesses when Trump was briefed on the Trump Tower meeting. As I have noted previously, it was a potentially credible claim precisely because it would be so easy to disprove, if no one corroborated it. Either Cohen lied to Davis, or Davis made Cohen into a liar (again). Either way, this could well end up as a rare case where both a client and his attorney are called before bar proceedings.

    The D.C. and New York bars may want to know who came up with the allegedly false stories — and why neither man came forward immediately to correct the record (particularly as money poured into Cohen’s GoFundMe site). If Cohen is responsible, his newly claimed moral clarity will be viewed as just another hustle from a self-described “fixer.” If Davis came up with these stories, he put his client in a materially worse position and the bar might want to know why — and whose interests were being advanced by such accounts. Just as his client seeks a deal with the special counsel to limit his prison time after pleading guilty, these admissions destroyed any residue of Cohen’s credibility as a witness for the prosecution. He also created an ethical equivalency between Trump and his accusers.

    Davis recently declared that “this is about truth versus lying and ultimately Donald Trump is going to be done in by the truth.” Of course, truth is rarely the undoing of Washington insiders, particularly those whose careers have been to transform or a least transcend truth. So it is likely that a short but decent interval will follow and then truth will return to its previously inconsequential position in Washington.

    http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciar...of-2018-is-year-of-lawyers-living-dangerously
     
    #157     Aug 29, 2018
  8. TJustice

    TJustice

    These last 2 paragraphs were powerful....



    Just as his client seeks a deal with the special counsel to limit his prison time after pleading guilty, these admissions destroyed any residue of Cohen’s credibility as a witness for the prosecution. He also created an ethical equivalency between Trump and his accusers.

    Davis recently declared that “this is about truth versus lying and ultimately Donald Trump is going to be done in by the truth.” Of course, truth is rarely the undoing of Washington insiders, particularly those whose careers have been to transform or a least transcend truth. So it is likely that a short but decent interval will follow and then truth will return to its previously inconsequential position in Washington.
     
    #158     Aug 29, 2018
  9. Cuddles

    Cuddles





     
    #159     Dec 8, 2018
  10. Cuddles

    Cuddles


     
    #160     Dec 8, 2018