The Porn Star and the President - Part III

 

The Porn Star and the President – Part III

(A Story of Lying)

 IN PART II, MR. GIULIANI WAS BUSY STICKING BOTH FEET IN HIS MOUTH, AND EVERYBODY SEEMED HEADED FOR JAIL. 

RUDY PICKS UP WHERE WE LEFT OFF:

 

5/7/18: The Rudy Giuliani Traveling Circus makes the talk show rounds. Now he claims the president wants to testify in the Mueller probe. 

However, Rudy insists that Trump shouldn’t have to. If he did, the president would probably invoke the Fifth Amendment. 

(It beats lying – because in court that’s perjury.)

 

No one, least of all Rudy, can say exactly what Trump knew about the payoff to Stormy Daniels, or when he knew what he knew, or answer inquiries about other possible payments. In yet another disastrous interview, Rudy responds to a question by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. Could Lawyer Cohen have made more payments to more women? 

“I have no knowledge of that,” Giuliani winces and blinks. “But I would think if it was necessary, yes.”  

Even Kellyanne Conway, White House aide and glibbest of liars, salary paid by taxpayers, told Jake Tapper on CNN she had no idea if similar payoffs were made to anyone else. For once she dared not risk a definitive “no.” 

“They didn’t cross my desk as campaign manager [in 2016],” she dodged. “And I would also tell you that I’m happy to answer these questions, but I have limited visibility into what Mayor Giuliani is talking about, because, politely, he is the president’s counsel. I am the president's counselor,” she said.

Different liars, different jobs.

 

She insisted that Trump had not been lying when he told reporters that he did not know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. 

“No,” he had said. He did not elaborate. 

Pressed again on why Cohen would have made the payment, Trump had responded: “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.” Only Cohen knew what was going on. Now Conway insisted the president still wasn’t lying.

So, she still wasn’t lying. 

 

The unenviable position of lying to help a liar. 

Conway tap-danced and told Tapper that you had to look at the president’s three recent tweets to understand the point he had been trying to make. “I’m going to relay to you what the president has told me, which is the best I can do. He didn’t know it at the time the payment occurred.” 

Tapper refused to let Conway off the hook.  

He noted that reporters on Air Force One had asked the president, “Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” 

He responded, “No. No. What else?” 

The immediate follow up question was, “Do you know where he [Cohen] got the money to make that payment?” 

“No. I don’t know,” Trump replied. 

“That’s present tense,” Tapper pointed out to Conway. “But he did know.” 

Conway was in the unenviable position of lying to help a liar. Giuliani had made her lie for Sunday morning obsolete (see: 5/4-5/18). He had admitted that Trump paid Cohen back over several months – and that he paid him back before he denied knowing about the matter on Air Force One. 

Even Fox News was forced to report this story, because Giuliani had been speaking on Fox News. They just didn’t choose to put 1 + 1 together and tax the brains of loyal viewers.

Rudy, trying to remember if he had already lied about something.

___ 

 

5/16/18: This is an awful day for President Trump – Banger of Porn Queens. First, he’s required to file paperwork and admit he paid Michael Cohen back in 2017, after his personal lawyer gave $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.

This means, that regarding the Stormy Daniels story:

 

A)    Cohen has been lying for months.

 

B)     Trump has been lying for almost as long.

 

C)    Team Trump is replete with liars of various colors, shapes, and sizes.

 

D)   The president knew members of his team were liars and didn’t correct them because…

 

E)     Birds of a feather.

 

 

The American people might not care about a consensual sexual relationship between Citizen Trump and a porn star in 2006. 

When the President of the United States lies about it, and does so aboard Air Force One, that’s a serious matter.

___ 

 

5/22/18: It’s another bad day for Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. A longtime business partner pleads guilty and agrees to cooperate with investigators. That partner is Evegeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant, known as the New York City “Taxi King.” Freidman avoids a lengthy jail sentence and is required to hand over $1 million to settle unpaid taxes.

 

* 

The Bunny aborted! 

IN A RELATED STORY, Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado, floats a theory about Cohen. Campos notes that Trump’s lawyer was involved in three hush money settlements in 2016. Two involved Trump. One was payment to Stormy Daniels. A second payment went to Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal. The third involved Elliot Broidy, a heavy-hitting GOP fundraiser, who impregnated another Playboy Bunny, Shera Bechard. (See: 4/14/18.) 

Campos’s theory: Broidy took a fall for…Donald J. Trump! 

Campos notes several intriguing details. In all three settlements the women were initially “represented” by a lawyer named Keith Davidson. Davidson has since been accused of conspiring with Cohen to insure all three clients remained quiet. In the Daniels case and the Broidy case, Cohen used nearly identical non-disclosure language. He used the same pseudonyms. For the women: Peggy Petersen. For the men: David Dennison. And the two Petersen/Dennison payoffs were routed through the same L.L.C., Essential Consultants, set up by Cohen during the 2016 campaign. 

Broidy took the hit for his sins and paid $1.6 million to hush up the pregnant Bunny. Soon after, he gained direct access to President Trump. This led to a private meeting at the White House where a business deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was discussed. The United Arab Emirates agreed to give Broidy a contract to provide security services worth perhaps $600 million. 

Leaked emails between Broidy and George Nader show another interesting connection. Here the Associated Press picks up the story:

 

Just two days before that meeting, on November 30, Broidy wired $200,000 from his Bank of America account to Real Estate Attorneys’ Group, a California firm. On December 5, REAG transferred that money to attorney Keith Davidson. Davidson was at the time supposedly representing the legal interests of Shera Bechard, a Playboy model with whom Broidy now claims to have had an affair. (Bechard fired Davidson shortly afterward, when she became convinced that Davidson was actually working in concert with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, to protect Cohen’s client’s interests rather than hers.) That $200,000 was supposed to be the first of eight quarterly payments that “David Dennison” agreed to make to Bechard, in order to buy her silence about an affair and a subsequent abortion. All this was laid out in an NDA recovered from Michael Cohen’s office when it was raided last month.

 

Now, being a fact-based blogger, let me say we cannot know where this tale will end. We do know this. Nader is cooperating with Mueller. Nader has been in several meetings with Broidy. 

Broidy doesn't look like the kind of guy a Playboy Bunny would sleep with.

 

Did the Bunny abort Donald’s love child? 

If Broidy were covering for Trump, if Trump were the actual semen donor in the Bechard affair, all kinds of campaign finance laws would have been pulverized. Broidy’s deal with the UAE might be viewed as a quid pro quo. Trump gets silence from the pregnant Bunny. Broidy gets a contract worth hundreds of millions. Saudi Arabia and the UAE get the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want. To be precise: they want U.S. pressure on Qatar, a neighboring rival. 

And as an added “bonus,” the Playboy Bunny would have aborted…Donald J. Trump’s love child! 

There may be nothing to this theory; but we already know a Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, was paid $30,000 to keep quiet about Trump and a housekeeper’s child. 

We know Broidy was previously convicted of bribing New York State officials. 

We know that the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, has warned that two other women whose stories appear credible may have received large hush money settlements in 2016. 

So, we can assume Cohen is worried. And if Cohen is worried the President of the United States is worried.

 

UPDATE (4/15/24): To be fair, nothing has ever come of this Broidy-Bunny-Trump Bunny-Baby-story. It could be, for once on this blog, that we were totally wrong – although we did label this as a “theory” from the start. Generally, save for typos and misspellings of names, and too many examples of poor sentence-structure, your humble blogger has been on target in what he says. 

It is, of course, interesting to ponder one final question, regarding Berchard, Broidy and the baby: Why did President Trump go out of his way, in the waning days of his sinking administration, to pardon Mr. Broidy?

April 16, 2018: Michael Cohen Had only Three Clients in the Last Year

 

4/16/18: Some days you don’t know whether to be terrified by what Trump is doing or doubled over with laughter. Yesterday, lawyers for the president and lawyers for his lawyer tried to block release of information gathered in the recent F.B.I. raids on Michael Cohen’s home, offices, etc. 

It turns out Cohen has had only three legal clients in the past year. One would be Trump. Second would be Elliott Broidy. Both have been accused of boinking Playmate Bunnies despite the fact they, the boinkers, were married at the time of the Bunny-boinking. The third client turns out to be none other than Sean Hannity, noted pillar of gelled-hair rectitude at Fox News. 

Please, please, let there be another pregnant Bunny.

We don’t know yet, what Cohen might have been doing for Mr. Hannity, what he might have been fixing for the Fox host. Hannity says it was nothing, just a little idle chit and chat. He may be telling the truth. Considering the company he’s keeping, you can’t be blamed if you have a smidge of doubt. 

I, for one, will readily admit I hope it turns out that another Playboy Bunny has been boinked and impregnated. 

By Hannity himself.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/8/2022): I am sorry to say, in editing my blog four years later, that I did not get my wish.

May 22, 2018: Turn Over a Stone in Trumpistan and Criminal Types Scurry Away in the Light

 

5/22/18: It’s another bad day for Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. A long-time business partner pleads guilty and agrees to cooperate with investigators. That partner is Evegeny A. Freidman, a Russian immigrant (of course), known as the New York City “Taxi King.” Freidman avoids a lengthy jail sentence and is required to hand over $1 million to settle unpaid taxes.

 

*

Shera Bechard on the job.

IN A RELATED STORY, Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado, floats a theory about Cohen. Campos notes that Trump’s lawyer was involved in three hush money settlements in 2016. Two involved Trump. One was a payment to Stormy Daniels. A second payment went to Playboy Bunny Karen McDougal. The third involved Elliot Broidy, a heavy-hitting GOP fundraiser, who impregnated another Playboy Bunny, Shera Bechard. (See: 4/14/18 and 4/16/18.) 

Campos’s theory: Broidy took a fall for…Donald J. Trump! 

Campos notes several intriguing details. In all three settlements the women were initially “represented” by a lawyer named Keith Davidson. Davidson has since been accused of conspiring with Cohen to insure all three clients remained quiet. In the Daniels case and the Broidy case, Cohen used nearly identical non-disclosure language. He used the same pseudonyms. For the women: Peggy Petersen. For the men: David Dennison. And the two Petersen/Dennison payoffs were routed through the same L.L.C., Essential Consultants, set up by Cohen during the 2016 campaign. 

Broidy took the hit for his sins and paid $1.6 million to hush up the pregnant Bunny. Soon after, he gained direct access to President Trump. This led to a private meeting at the White House where a business deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was discussed. The United Arab Emirates agreed to give Broidy a contract to provide security services worth perhaps $600 million.

 

Leaked emails between Broidy and George Nader show another interesting connection. Here the Associated Press picks up the story: 

Just two days before that meeting, on November 30, Broidy wired $200,000 from his Bank of America account to Real Estate Attorneys’ Group, a California firm. On December 5, REAG transferred that money to attorney Keith Davidson. Davidson was at the time supposedly representing the legal interests of Shera Bechard, a Playboy model with whom Broidy now claims to have had an affair. (Bechard fired Davidson shortly afterward, when she became convinced that Davidson was actually working in concert with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, to protect Cohen’s client’s interests rather than hers.) That $200,000 was supposed to be the first of eight quarterly payments that “David Dennison” agreed to make to Bechard, in order to buy her silence about an affair and a subsequent abortion. All this was laid out in an NDA recovered from Michael Cohen’s office when it was raided last month.

 

Now, being a fact-based blogger, let me say we cannot know where this tale will end. We do know this. Nader is cooperating with Mueller. Nader has been in several meetings with Broidy. 

 

Did the Bunny abort Donald’s love child? 

If Broidy was covering for Trump, if Trump were the actual semen donor in the Bechard affair, all kinds of campaign finance laws would have been broken. Broidy’s deal with the UAE might be viewed as a quid pro quo. Trump gets silence from the pregnant Bunny. Broidy gets a contract worth hundreds of millions. Saudi Arabia and the UAE get the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want. To be precise: they want U.S. pressure on Qatar, a neighboring rival. 

And as an added “bonus,” the Playboy Bunny would have aborted…Donald J. Trump’s love child! 

There may be nothing to this theory; but we already know a Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, was paid $30,000 to keep quiet about Trump and a housekeeper’s child. 

We know Broidy was previously convicted of bribing New York State officials. 

We know that the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, has warned that two other women whose stories appear credible may have received large hush money settlements in 2016. 

So, we can assume Cohen is worried. And if Cohen is worried the President of the United States is worried.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (September 2020): Nothing has ever come of this Broidy-Bunny-Trump Bunny-Baby-story. It could be, for once on this blog, that we were totally wrong. Generally, save for typos and misspellings of names, and too many examples of poor sentence structure, your humble blogger has been on target in what he says. 

It is, of course, interesting to ponder the question: Why did President Trump go out of his way, in the waning days of his sinking administration, to pardon Mr. Broidy?

The fat dope on the left is Mr. Broidy, seen here with his wife.

August 31, 2018: The Witch Hunters Find a Real Witch

 

8/31/18: At this point, if federal investigators caught President Trump with a conical hat on his head, a book of spells in his hands, and a bubbling brew of noxious ingredients in a cauldron in the Oval Office, his Helen Keller-like fans would still insist he has nothing to do with witchcraft. 

 

Another witch is brought to justice. 

Friday, prosecutors bring another witch to justice. This witch, like several others recently, pleads guilty and agrees to cooperate with authorities. This time the man in the pointed black hat is W. Samuel Patten, heretofore a little-known Republican lobbyist. What makes Patten interesting in the Russia story is that he has long had ties with Paul Manafort, the convicted felon. 

Like Manafort, Patten worked secretly for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party, backed by Vladimir Putin. In the process he earned a cool million dollars plus for his services. If the Russians killed a few thousand Ukrainians in attacks along their country’s border, Patten wasn’t bothered. 

Hey, a million dollars plus!

 

Patten, left, heads to court with wife.

Patten also formed a company with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence agent (naturally). 

Kilimnik was indicted along with Manafort recently, in a separate federal investigation. Both are scheduled to stand trial starting September 24; but Kilimnik will decline to attend. He has fled to Russia. 

Patten pled guilty to funneling a $50,000 donation from foreign sources to the Trump Inaugural Committee, which is, for obvious reasons, illegal. That crime may not seem like much to Trump’s base. Patten copped to a single felony, while admitting to several more.

 

Is there anything else fishy, regarding the Trump Inaugural Committee? Vice chairmen of the Committee included, Elliott Broidy, a bigtime Republican financier, and Rick Gates (now a convicted felon). A year ago, the “Fake News Media” revealed that Broidy had agreed to a $1.6 million hush money payment to a Playboy Bunny who claims he impregnated her Bunny self. That Bunny went on to have an abortion (because, of course, Republicans want to overturn Roe v.  Wade). 

Who set up that lucrative deal? It was Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer (now a felon).

 

* 

AT LEAST ONE REPUBLICAN, Michael London, a former member of the Trumbull, Connecticut Town Council announces he is quitting the party. 

Why? 

London is blunt. In an op-ed published by the Hartford Courant, London says his decision to quit the party and register as an unaffiliated voter was “something that I never thought I would do.”  

I blame President Trump for turning the Grand Old Party into a lame, extreme right-wing group of people unwilling or unable to see the truth. But Trump is not alone in causing my disillusionment.

 

I have had it with the state and federal branches of the Republican Party that tolerated the president’s behavior. None of our GOP candidates for governor denounced Trump. None of the leaders of Connecticut’s GOP will speak out.

 

Trump, he added, with complete disgust, is “the worst president our country has had — ever.”

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (5/30/22): It would be comical, were it not sad, but Elliott Broidy later gets indicted, convicted in a scheme to funnel foreign money to Trump-affiliated groups, and then gets a last-minute pardon, as Trump heads out the door. 

Thomas Barrack, head of the Trump Inaugural Committee is, as I type this note, under indictment for the same kind of crimes.

June 4, 2019: Witch Hunt? A Witch Gets Shot off a Broom

 

6/4/19: The Mueller “Witch Hunt” continues. George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman is the latest witch to be shot down while riding a broom. Nader was arrested on June 3, after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. His arrest, under sealed indictment, stems from the Russia investigation. That means he spends today consulting with lawyers. 

Nader with the president.

 

Questioned about suspicious contacts with Russians. 

Nadar, an occasional Trump adviser, was first stopped by F.B.I. agents at a D.C. airport on January 17, 2018. He was pulled into a side room and questioned about suspicious contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign. At the time, Nader was headed for Mar-a-Lago, to celebrate Trump’s first year at the helm. 

Nader had also been part of the Trump transition team, headed up by that paragon of Christian virtue, Vice President Jesus. 

Now, agents wielding a warrant confiscated his electronic devices (Nader’s, not the vice president’s). A subsequent search revealed evidence of possible child pornography. A new warrant resulted. A dozen sexually explicit videos were recovered. That led to a sealed indictment. But yesterday was the first chance authorities had to arrest Nader, who works overseas. 

If convicted, Nader – who was convicted on child pornography charges in the Czech Republic in 1991 – faces at least fifteen years in prison.

 

Nader is exactly the type of sleazebag who routinely floats to the top in stories involving Mr. Trump. He first came to the attention of federal investigators when they got wind of a secret meeting in January 2017, in The Seychelles. Admit it: you have no idea where these islands are. 

Neither did this blogger. 

This explains why they were perfect for a secret meeting. Nadar was one participant. Kirill Dmitriev, representing Vladimir Putin, was a second. Third was Erik Prince, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Once the secret meeting was revealed, Prince claimed it was all a matter of chance. He just happened to be vacationing in The Seychelles. And he just happened to run into the Russian guy in a bar. And they just happened to decide to have a friendly chat, of no consequence. 

The Mueller Report proves otherwise. Nader set it all up. Mueller has emails and phone records.

 

That wasn’t the first time Nader was involved in a suspicious secret meeting. In May 2018, the “Fake News” New York Times broke the story of another secret conclave. This one, in August 2016, had involved Nader, Donald Trump Jr., and representatives of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

Plus: Erik Prince! 

Plus: Joel Zamel, representing an Israeli tech company. Zamel pitched a plan to “to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Hillary Clinton.” 

Participants in that meeting disagree about what happened next, with almost everyone conveniently denying any such work was ever performed (which would surely have been illegal). 

Oddly enough, Mueller’s team turned up evidence that Nader sent Zamel $2,000,000 after the election.

 

To spice up the story, let’s toss another felon into the stew. After Trump won the election, Nader helped arrange a defense consulting deal between the United Arab Emirates and Elliott Broidy. That deal was worth as much as $600 million. It was an odd choice, for sure, since Broidy wasn’t the type you’d trust with a contract of that magnitude, or any other contract. He was convicted in 2009 of paying a cool million dollars in bribes to New York State officials. In return, he had scored a deal to invest $250 million in New York State pension funds. 

Broidy is also the guy who agreed to pay a $1.6 million hush money payment to a Playboy Bunny he impregnated. 

That deal was worked out by a third felon, Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer. 

The Bunny had an abortion.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (August 2019): We were in error, above. Broidy is not a felon. He plead guilty to a felony, but was later allowed to plead to a misdemeanor after he agreed to cooperate with investigators in the bribery scandal.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE #2 (October 2020): Okay, Broidy is now a felon again. This time he plead guilty to one charge of influence-peddling on behalf of foreign countries, while also having President Trump’s ear. 

In one case, “Foreign National A” handed Broidy what an ordinary person might refer to as a $9 million bribe.

July 8, 2019: Trump Inaugural Committee Figure Under Investigation

 

7/8/19: Believe it or not, Trump’s approval ratings are up, to 45.1 percent (vs. 52.4 percent disapproval). 

That upward tick may not last. CNN reports that previously convicted felon Elliott Broidy, and Trump bosom buddy, is again under investigation. Federal prosecutors have requested information about “contacts with foreign leaders and businesses while working for President Donald Trump’s inauguration.” 

The request comes as part of a probe into whether Broidy, a Los Angeles private investor, sought to sell his influence with the Trump administration.

 

The US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York in April subpoenaed the President’s Inaugural Committee seeking documents and records relating to Broidy, five companies associated with him and foreign politicians – including the presidents of Angola and the Republic of Congo and two Romanian politicians, the sources said.

 

The grand jury subpoena also requests information about George Nader, a key witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation who was arrested last month on child pornography charges.

 

CNN notes that a representative of the Inaugural Committee declined to comment for the story. (See: 7/19/19.)

Since I have been editing my blog,

I can jump ahead and post this picture.

 

July 19, 2019: Two Trump Pals Suspected of Committing Felonies

 

7/19/19: George Nader’s legal problems grow. Already locked in the can, with bail denied, the former Trump adviser is charged with sex-trafficking of an underage minor, a 14-year-old boy. 

As the Associated Press notes (and even Fox News picks up the story): 

Nader’s name shows up more than 100 times in [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller’s report. It details his efforts to serve as liaison between a Russian banker close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and members of President Donald Trump’s transition team.

 

Nader also served as an adviser to the United Arab Emirates, a close Saudi ally, and in April 2017 wired $2.5 million to a top Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada….The goal was to persuade the U.S. to take a hard line against Qatar, a longtime American ally but now an adversary of the UAE. 

Diplomacy for sale.

Good pals!

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (1/16/22): Nader is eventually convicted of sex-trafficking, and then convicted again, for illegally funneling foreign money into U.S. political campaigns, first, Hillary Clinton, second, to Donald J. Trump’s inauguration committee. 

Broidy also gets indicted and pleads guilty in June 2020 – and then, lo and behold, he doth receive a golden pardon from on high! 

With only hours left in office, President Trump granted Broidy an undeserved pardon, just before he slinked away to Mar-a-Lago in a sulk. 

Broidy, by the way, had admitted to taking millions of dollars from foreign interests in return for his fine efforts to lobby the Department of Justice to, how shall we say it, turn a blind eye to criminality.