President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen said in a court filing Wednesday that he would plead the Fifth Amendment in adult film star Stephanie Clifford’s lawsuit over a nondisclosure agreement she signed in 2016.
In a court filing Wednesday, Cohen tied the criminal probe directly to his assertion of Fifth Amendment rights in the civil suit.
“I will assert my 5th amendment rights in connection with all proceedings in this case due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York,” he said in part. Cohen last week asked U.S. District Judge James Otero to delay the civil suit due to its overlap with the criminal probe.
So to be clear Trump's lawyer is refusing to answer questions in court because he is worried those answers will incriminate him in a criminal activity.
Well now, isn't THAT interesting?
Also today Trump called into Fox and Friends, and finally admitted what we have known all along.
Also courtesy of TPM:
The President said Michael Cohen is mainly a businessman and only secondarily a lawyer. That at least undercuts his privilege argument. He says what prosecutors are looking at only has to do with Cohen’s personal business dealings, not with his representation of Donald Trump. He also said that he knows nothing about Cohen’s private business dealings. (“I don’t know his business… They’re looking at something having to do with his business. I have nothing to do with his business.”) That’s almost certainly false.
That is also going to make it hard for Cohen to claim executive privilege to keep the Feds from digging through the files that confiscated.
And then there was also this:
Trump says explicitly for the first time that Cohen does represent him with Stormy Daniels: “He represents me like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal.”
Boom! There you have it.
I mean WE knew it all along, but Trump and the White House was working hard not to admit this.
I imagine that after this admission Trump's lawyers spent the morning banging their heads against the wall, but is certainly made at least one lawyer very happy.
Thank you @foxandfriends for having Mr. Trump on this morning to discuss Michael Cohen and our case. Very informative.— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) April 26, 2018
Outmaneuvered again.Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen previously represented to the American people that Mr. Cohen acted on his own and Mr. Trump knew nothing about the agreement with my client, the $130k payment, etc. As I predicted, that has now been shown to be completely false. #basta— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) April 26, 2018
Source https://ift.tt/2HAbVPu
