I have different lawyers for different purposes. I won’t be going to a patent attorney for advice on real estate.
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Maybe that’s why Trump’s team released it – putting Cohen, as an attorney, in a bad light. (Did someone already suggest this?)
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I think he’s more worried about prison - he knows his license is gone.
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I don’t even know if that would be helpful. Trump’s Reality Distortion Field is set so powerfully inward that he’s called verbatim excerpts of his own tape-recorded conversations “fake news” (although that doesn’t mean much; he uses that moniker for any truthful or accurate statement that puts him in a bad light) and even privately doubted that was his voice on the Access Hollywood tape.
If the Michael Cohen tape came out, Trump would simply deny that was him. And to Trump, the simple act of denying something powerfully and irrevocably means that thing didn’t happen. (See, e.g., his repeated defenses of sex offenders like Doug Jones because they denied committing their crimes, and his belief that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election because Putin said so.) It’s a like child who covers his own eyes and then proclaims no one else can see him.
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Since the tape was entered into evidence after a review by the court of what material had attorney client privilege - that seems highly unlikely.
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This is the core question the Michael Cohen investigation will have to address. A conversation isn’t privileged simply because one party is a lawyer. The lawyer has to be acting in his capacity as such. Hence the relevance of the revelation a couple months ago that Cohen had only three clients and most of his work was “fixing” or otherwise brokering business deals. If his work for Trump was undertaken in that context, then his work product (or his conversations) wouldn’t be privileged.
As an added bonus, which former U.S. Attorney successfully prosecuted the New York mafia families by arguing, in part, that merely having a lawyer in the room doesn’t make a conversation privileged? One Rudolph Giuliani.
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The thing to remember is that the investigators have had all of the seized material firewalled and analyzed by a third party (“special master” I believe is the title), who makes determinations about whether some piece of seized evidence would breach attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors only get to see and use material that has passed that muster, and perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, the overwhelming majority of what’s been seized has been ruled as unprotected.
There’s also a specific limitation to this privilege, which states that if you go to your legal council and conspire with them or solicit advice from them about committing a crime, that conversation is explicitly not privileged.
Roman Mars’s podcast “What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law” actually had a whole episode talking about attorney-client privilege and the limitations surrounding it that I found very informative:
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If this is a distraction technique, it is the most short-sighted one ever, because now everyone who has ever done business with Cohen is biting their nails and wondering if they’re on tape. Distractions work by shifting attention from one thing to another, and if the other thing is “Cohen’s got tapes,” that’s going to make a lot of people very nervous. Cohen knows who and what he has on tape, and soon federal prosecutors will, too. He could get a message to a friend to cop a plea before they get to the juicy stuff, or a message might not even be necessary. This doesn’t make sense as a distraction. It makes a lot of sense as a warning shot to anyone who might be implicated.
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Shocking, right? Did anyone actually believe Putin wasn’t going to start cashing in on his investment? From Putin all the way down to Cohen this lot is all about shady deals.
And to avoid the usual FUD from the useful idiots and the gang at the trolley farm in St. Petersburg, this isn’t about Crimea (where Russia had a legitimate claim even without all the “little green men” and other shenanigans) but about Donbass and eastern Ukraine where Russia has no claim.
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well he is a lawyer. And Trump does employ him. Reports indicated he didn’t seem to do much actual legal work.
But it seems like at least 2/3 of the seized documents did turn out to be privledged. So he had to be doing some actual legal work.
So why does a lawyer make recordings of a client without their knowledge. If it was just about record keeping or covering the clients ass you’d be better off telling them.
But if it’s to cover your own ass. Or black mail them. Well gotta say that sounds like the sort of thing that wouldn’t qualify for attorney client protections.
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Yep. Taping as a prophylactic measure (very likely not limited to just Trump), little knowing that it may not make a bit of difference (except as a sentencing chip, of course). All that education… down the toilet.
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From the NYT article:
“Mr. Cohen’s lawyers discovered the recording as part of their review of the seized materials and shared it with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, according to three people briefed on the matter.”
There are three main options, as far as I can tell.
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The distraction/control theory: Trump or someone on his team released the recording to stay ahead of the story (cf. Don Jr’s emails) or to cause a distraction. I don’t like this theory because of my own, which is
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The Warning Shot: While a lot of people see the news and think, “Oh, Trump paid off another mistress,” there’s a lot of people who will see this and shit their pants because Cohen has tapes. This will make a lot people, whether or not they’re already in Mueller’s sights, reconsider lying or even come forward to cop a plea deal.
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I Beg Your Pardon: As the excerpt from the article makes clear, Cohen’s lawyers wanted Trump to know this tape existed. And wouldn’t it be a shame if all this pesky evidence got viewed? Don’t you wanna be my friend again, Donald?
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That’s a road that puts the Interstate Highway System to shame.
It seems worthwhile to investigate the “do any of these hush money payments constitute illegal campaign contributions?” angle though.
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Wait, keep it. If they ever want a Trump monument, as a warning to the next ten generations, an Eternal Dumpster Fire would be perfect.
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To add to my binge watching list:
“Cohen has other recordings of the President in his records that were seized by the FBI, said both a source with knowledge of Cohen’s tapes and Giuliani, who described the other recordings as mundane discussions.”
Mundane; I’m sure.
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The suspicion is that 45’s strategy is to downplay what’s on the tapes. As in “see it’s just a two minute innocent conversation about how to best proceed possibly paying this person off. We never paid her… therefore… nothing”. If they can discredit the validity of the tapes early enough it may soften the blow of whatever comes later.
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Interesting, sounds plausible. Crazy thing is that the mere existence of such a tape would sink virtually any other politician.
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It seems like they think it’s exculpatory because it includes Trump saying the payment should be traceable.
But it may not be. Making sure you don’t the i’s and cross the t’s on something illegal doesn’t make it not illegal. It confirms Trump had an affair. And knew about the payments. Went through the national inquirer to do it. And lied about it publicly.
Which really hasn’t had an effect yet. But isn’t a good look when it keeps happening. And admitting to something wrong thats not technically illegal to “prove” the illegal thing didn’t happen is their default strategy. Like rock scissor paper. But it’s ethical violation, patsy, not a puppet. And evidence of criminal wrong doing always loses.
I think it’s just part of their assumption that popular opinion should and does drive how any of these legal matters turn out. That of they can just provide a plausible enough story no-one can touch them.
We take the watergate with idiots approach. And I’d expect they edited the tape the way Nixon does. But it’s clear Mueller already has access to the whole tape. And any other tapes. So it’s safe to say if it really was exculpatory they wouldn’t be talking about it. The cases would just go away.
Option 2 would be the explaination that best fits their usual tactics of its anything more than pure PR.
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Yeah, this is the approach they took with the release of Don Jr.'s emails about the Trump meeting. And, for all the shit he’s been getting, Giuliani’s not as nuts as people like to believe. His strategy has seemed to be to admit to the philandering but deny the campaign finance violations, but Trump won’t play ball with that because he insists on denying everything.
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Except that if the payment were to be made in cash, they wouldn’t need that shell corporation/LLC.
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