There are those who will think that a denigrating and sexist title but what it means is a Girl you can call and have a chat with, go out and have fun with, dump all your emotional negativsm on as well as your weird and creepy perversions and walk away free of any personal connection because you paid cash, and a lot of it.
And we’ve been introduced to two fascinating people, Stephanie Clifford and Michael Avenatti and it’s fun when they show up but what does any of it mean?
(T)he tape is plenty dramatic on its own — and plenty revealing about how Trump and Cohen operated.
It confirms that Trump was well aware of Cohen’s involvement in the McDougal payoff. And since the two men use vague shorthand to describe it, Trump was likely very much in the loop on Cohen’s other legally questionable activities on his behalf as well. The ultimate legal implications, though, remain unclear.
Michael Cohen is a longtime lawyer and employee of Trump who’s called himself Trump’s “fix-it guy” — “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” he’s said. This role included trying to suppress scandalous stories that could damage Trump during the presidential campaign. By the time the tape was recorded, Cohen was already infamous for making profane, violent-sounding threats to reporters and others.
An important ally in this effort was American Media Inc. — the parent company of the National Enquirer, the famed supermarket tabloid, as well as other gossip outlets. The company’s chair, David Pecker, was a longtime personal friend of Trump. Trump himself was a frequent source for Enquirer stories, and the magazine would in return cover him positively — as it did, while savaging his opponents, during the 2016 campaign.
But that’s not all AMI did for Trump. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow has reported that the company was known to sometimes use a tabloid industry practice called “catch and kill” for major celebrity scandal stories. It would pay for exclusive rights to a source’s story about a scandal, and deliberately never publish it — as either part of a favor-trading relationship or an effort to gain leverage over the celebrity.
And in November 2015, AMI did that for Trump: The company paid a former Trump Tower doorman $30,000 for exclusive rights to his story that Trump had fathered a child with one of his employees, and never ran it.
Enter Karen McDougal. McDougal has said she had an affair with Trump from about June 2006 to April 2007, which began when they met at a party at the Playboy mansion (she was a Playboy model) and included multiple other encounters. As Trump’s presidential campaign heated up in 2016, McDougal tried to see if she could make some money from her decade-old experience.
A contact in the adult film industry put McDougal in touch with Keith Davidson (the same lawyer who later represented Stormy Daniels for a similar transaction). Davidson then opened discussions with AMI, the National Enquirer’s parent company. Eventually, on August 6, 2016, McDougal signed a contract to sell the exclusive rights to her story about her affair with Trump to AMI, in exchange for $150,000 and the promise of numerous columns and two cover features at AMI magazines. (AMI then, of course, didn’t run the affair story.)
During this process, it turns out that Davidson and AMI were in contact with Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Davidson, in fact, promptly informed Cohen when the deal was completed — raising some questions about who he was really working for. And on the September 2016 tape, Cohen discussed the matter with Trump.
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Rather than a smoking gun, the tape is probably most significant as a piece of a larger puzzle about an apparent hush money and scandal suppression operation for Trump. What we learned specifically from the tape is that Trump was well aware of Cohen’s involvement with AMI and David Pecker in hushing up McDougal.
The specific thing Trump and Cohen discuss doing in the tape is themselves paying AMI. There’s no evidence yet that they actually ended up doing this. So if the tape was in fact merely a brief hypothetical discussion of something that didn’t happen, it could be difficult to charge someone.
One problem looming over all this, though, is that money spent to help a candidate for federal office is supposed to be reported under campaign finance law.
None of these payments — from Cohen to Daniels, AMI to McDougal, or AMI to others — were reported. That puts all parties involved in legal jeopardy. The Trump Organization, too, could be in trouble, since Cohen explains that its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was helping him out.
Trump allies’ best chance of defending themselves is probably to argue that the payments weren’t truly campaign-related. Trump, for instance, could argue that he is a celebrity and that such payments are common among celebrities dealing with the tabloids. AMI, too, could try to argue that this was a standard practice it used in its celebrity coverage. But the evidence could well contradict these claims.
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Almost immediately after the raids, intense speculation began over whether Cohen would “flip” on Trump, and provide damaging information to prosecutors as part of a plea deal.
Instead, Cohen filed a lawsuit attempting to assert attorney-client privilege over as much of the seized material as possible, and prevent the government from seeing it. The Trump Organization joined the suit too, in an attempt to assert its own privilege. A federal judge in New York appointed a special master to adjudicate these claims.
After months, that process is now winding down, and the result has been that the government is getting the vast majority of the material the FBI seized from Cohen — out of more than 4 million files seized, around 3,000 have been deemed privileged or partially privileged by the special master so far.
Cohen’s allies, meanwhile, have been repeatedly dropping hints in the press that he’s thinking of cutting a deal with prosecutors rather than fighting expected charges against him. He publicly implied that in an interview with ABC, and then hired Lanny Davis, a longtime ally of the Clintons, to join his legal team (and manage his PR strategy).
There have also been a few hints that Cohen’s true desire was for Trump to agree to pay his expensive legal bills (or perhaps to get a pardon) — though if that was the case, it does not seem to be working.
Still, there’s been no word of Cohen actually entering into talks with prosecutors about a plea deal just yet. But both sides may have been waiting for the special master’s review to conclude, to get a better idea of what the government actually had on Cohen.
In any case, Cohen certainly appears to be more antagonistic to Trump than ever, as seen in not just his leak of the tape but his leak of it to CNN — the network so loathed by the president. So expect more revelations to come.
