Mostly Monday Michael Cohen Reads

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

There’s a lot of insanity today from the MAGA crowd and its imperial maggot.  Let’s start but not end there.

This is from CNBC‘s Dan Magan. “Trump said ‘there’s going to be a lot of woman coming forward’ if he ran for president, Michael Cohen testifies.” 

Michael Cohen testified Monday that Donald Trump warned him that “just be prepared, there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward,” once Trump announced that he was running for president.

Cohen also testified about secretly recording Trump during a meeting about reimbursing the publisher of The National Enquirer for making a $150,000 hush money payment to a Playboy model to buy her silence about an alleged affair with Trump.

Cohen’s revelations came on his first day of testimony at Trump’s New York criminal hush money trial, where the former lawyer and fixer detailed efforts to protect Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 from being harmed by salacious disclosures.

Once slavishly devoted to Trump, Cohen is now his avowed enemy and could be the key witness against him in the case in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The 57-year-old is set to tell jurors about how he paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election, in exchange for her silence about a one-night stand she had with Trump a decade earlier.

Trump’s reimbursement of Cohen for that payoff while he was serving in the White House is the basis for the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against the ex-president.

The Trump Organization reported the Daniels-related reimbursements to Cohen as legal expenses. But District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges that this constituted a crime — falsification of business records — committed by Trump to hide the fact that the hush money had protected his then-wobbling presidential candidate at a key moment.

Cohen will probably continue to behave, but his outside social media, much like his former boss’s, is a challenging problem for the court. This is from the Washington Post‘s Blair Guild. “The weird world of Michael Cohen’s live TikTok streaming.  The former Trump fixer, now a critic, is expected to take the stand this week in Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial. Meanwhile, he is live wearing cowboy hat filters, receiving calls from Rosie O’Donnell and sharing his feelings on TikTok.”

The Trump fixer turned critic riffs on whatever he wants: his political beliefs, books he’s recently read and the New York Rangers have all come up. But notably, Cohen, a disbarred lawyer, occasionally veers into rants about Trump.
Cohen suspects Trump’s legal team is tuning in to his live streams.

Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche last week urged the judge in the case to prohibit Cohen from talking about Trump outside of court, saying it was unfair because Trump cannot respond to the attacks.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan did not issue a formal order, but he instructed prosecutors “to communicate to Mr. Cohen that the judge is asking him to refrain from making any more statements about this case.”

Prosecutors said they have told Cohen and other witnesses to refrain from speaking about Trump — but they conceded that they have no real power to make them stop.

The live streams typically attract a few thousand viewers, wide-ranging in their opinions about Cohen. The comments section is a mixed bag of people attacking Cohen with clown-face emojis and supporters defending his personal growth out of Trump’s sphere.

There are examples if you happen to be interested. I’ve lived long enough to be tired of white men and their ever-lasting gobstopper whinging.  Cohen is not a victim. He is one in a long line of enablers. His life would be better served if he engaged in behavior that wasn’t quite so self-serving.

I want to take some time again to show you the impact of the MAGA cult on those of us unfortunate enough to have MAGA legislators and governors.  They’re really coming from women here in Louisiana.  They want complete control over us.  This is what happens when any person with a brain sits out an election.

Here are some really appalling policies put into place to punish women for being women. We are chattel here. This is from the AP. “Louisiana lawmakers reject adding exceptions of rape and incest to abortion ban.” I’m pretty sure the woman who is now our state AG will not take these laws to the Supreme Court.  Instead, she will fight the groups that do.

Despite pleas from Democrats and gut-wrenching testimony from doctors and rape survivors, a GOP-controlled legislative committee rejected a bill Tuesday that would have added cases of rape and incest as exceptions to Louisiana’s abortion ban.

In the reliably red state, which is firmly ensconced in the Bible Belt and where even some Democrats oppose abortions, adding exceptions to Louisiana’s strict law has been an ongoing battle for advocates — with a similar measure failing last year. Currently, of the 14 states with abortion bans at all stages of pregnancy, six have exceptions in cases of rape and five have exceptions for incest.

“I will beg (committee) members to come to common sense,” Democratic state Rep. Alonzo Knox said to fellow lawmakers ahead of the vote, urging them to give approval to the exceptions. “I’m begging now.”

Lawmakers voted against the bill along party lines, with the measure failing 4-7.

A nearly identical bill met the same fate last year, effectively dying in the same committee. In the hopes of advancing the legislation out of committee and to the House floor for full debate, bill sponsor Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd added an amendment to the measure so that the exceptions would only apply to those who are younger than 17. However, the change was still not enough to sway opponents.

This week, they’re preparing this move, as reported in the Washington Post. “Louisiana moves to make abortion pills ‘controlled dangerous substances.’  Someone possessing the pills without a valid prescription or outside of professional practice could be prosecuted and sentenced to prison.”

H/T to JJ.

Screaming is not enough. What always makes me maddest is when any woman gives power to men who have an interest in uprooting the power of women.  This is from the marvelous Joyce Vance at her Substack.  “Mar-a-No-Go. There was little doubt before last week that federal Judge Aileen Cannon was determined to delay Trump’s criminal case in front of her—the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case—until after the election. Now, there is none.”

It’s been apparent for months that the May 20 trial date in this case wasn’t going to be the actual start of trial, as the Judge let critical motions stack up and refused to rule. This week, she announced that the trial date was off, and then she refused to set a new one. Special Counsel Jack Smith had asked for a July trial date, but Judge Cannon said it would be “imprudent and inconsistent” with her duty to “fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions … [and] … critical CIPA issues … necessary to present this case to a jury.”

This case could and should have been ready for trial in December or January if she had been working on the motions and realistic deadlines all along.

Judge Cannon’s action here bears a striking similarity to what Trump asked her to do back in July of 2023, when he and co-defendant Walt Nauta filed a joint motion asking her to “postpone initial consideration of any rescheduled trial date until after substantive motions have been presented and adjudicated.” She didn’t then; she scheduled the May trial date. But now, she has given Trump what he wanted all along, and it’s contrary to what the law directs judges to do.

The Speedy Trial Act provides that, “In any case involving a defendant charged with an offense, the appropriate judicial officer, at the earliest practicable time, shall, after consultation with the counsel for the defendant and the attorney for the Government, set the case for trial on a day certain, or list it for trial on a weekly or other short-term trial calendar at a place within the judicial district, so as to assure a speedy trial.” Refusing to set a trial date is not what the rules authorize federal judges to do; in fact, the rules direct judges to set a trial date at the beginning of the case, before all of the motions are even filed. Here, we have a Judge who won’t set a trial date because of eight motions that are still pending on her docket because she has refrained from deciding them.

If one of us has our civil rights denied, we all face the same fate.  If the Justice system puts any person or company above the law, there is no such thing as true Justice in this country.

This is from Chris Geidner, writing at Law Dork. “Justice Thomas has used this “hideous place” to amass the power he now exploits. Thomas’s attack on Washington comes as he will, yet again, issue rulings that set the national rules for the legal questions before the justices.”

It is in this context that one must regard Justice Clarence Thomas’s latest attack on the city that has provided him with a federal government job since the late 1970s.

“I think what you are going to find and especially in Washington, people pride themselves on being awful. It is a hideous place as far as I’m concerned,” Thomas told the audience at the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Conference, per the Associated Press, on Friday.

It is, however, a “hideous place” that Thomas has nonetheless used to obtain increasing positions of power over the decades. Ever since he reached his perch on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991, he has used that position to provide others within positions of power with access to the Supreme Court’s building; to establish and build relationships with the rich and powerful; and, finally, to create his own network of power among his former clerks.

…

Over the next seven weeks, Thomas will be one of nine people releasing decisions in 40 cases at the Supreme Court that will set forth the standard for whether presidents will be immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office for life, whether his Bruen decision renders unconstitutional the federal ban on gun possession by those people who have a domestic-violence restraining order out against them, and whether medication abortion remains accessible in a post-Roe America on its current terms, among many other pivotal decisions.

Further still — and throwing his cries of grievance even further into doubt — he will be doing so on a court that is the most conservative it has ever been since he joined it.

Thomas’s vote matters in all of those 40 cases, he will write an opinion in many of them; and he will write the court’s opinion in a handful of cases — setting the national rule for whatever legal question is at issue in those cases.

It is the 33rd year in which Clarence Thomas is doing so as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. From this “hideous place.”

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?