U.S. Politics: The Flood Shall Wash Away The Cobbs

[Fragile Bird]

32 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Even if it did play out like that, it’s highly unlikely that Cohen and Trump didn’t discuss Trump’s relationship with Stormy. Cohen would have wanted to know if he should offer her hush money and a NDA or threaten her with a defamation suit if Trump said she’s lying. And considering Loose Lips Rudy implied there could be more hush money cases, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that Trump told Cohen about a few people who needed to be silenced before the election took place.

You know what? After seeing Stormy Daniels on SNL say stormy weather was coming, my expectation is her lawyer will start unleashing the other women he said approached him saying they received hush money and signed NDAs. One a month for the next six months sounds pretty good to me!

[Jace, Extat]

9 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know what? After seeing Stormy Daniels on SNL say stormy weather wa coming, my expectation is her lawyer will start unleashing the other women he said approached him saying they received hush money and signed NDAs. One a month for the next six months sounds pretty good to me!

Weekly.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

42 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

You know what? After seeing Stormy Daniels on SNL say stormy weather was coming, my expectation is her lawyer will start unleashing the other women he said approached him saying they received hush money and signed NDAs. One a month for the next six months sounds pretty good to me!

Can they do that though if the NDAs haven’t been clearly violated?  

[Fragile Bird]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Can they do that though if the NDAs haven’t been clearly violated?  

Some of the women, I gather, signed NDAs and were interested in getting out of them, and others, from what Avenatti said some time ago, claim they had affairs with Trump but he didn't know about NDAs. There were at least half a dozen women who have approached him.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

37 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Some of the women, I gather, signed NDAs and were interested in getting out of them, and others, from what Avenatti said some time ago, claim they had affairs with Trump but he didn't know about NDAs. There were at least half a dozen women who have approached him.

How would they get out of the agreements though if the terms haven’t been violated and/or Trump’s legal team won’t agree to undo them? I’m not the lawyer here, but I don’t see a path for them to get out of them. I think Avenatti is just continuing to bait and troll Trump.  

[Jace, Extat]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

How would they get out of the agreements though if the terms haven’t been violated and/or Trump’s legal team won’t agree to undo them? I’m not the lawyer here, but I don’t see a path for them to get out of them. I think Avenatti is just continuing to bait and troll Trump.  

They don't even have to say anything. They can just discuss cum shots with Stormy on her new CNN program "45 and President"

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

How would they get out of the agreements though if the terms haven’t been violated and/or Trump’s legal team won’t agree to undo them? I’m not the lawyer here, but I don’t see a path for them to get out of them. I think Avenatti is just continuing to bait and troll Trump.  

1.  You might could find a judge that would find them void as against public policy.

2.  You might could find a billionaire willing to bankroll the penalty

[Mexal]

5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Speaking of laundering Russian money, reporters have been busy doing all kinds of the hard slogging work that is the hallmark of investigative reporting. 

Good report on CNN.

Research into real estate records shows in the last couple of years Cohen sold 4 high rise buildings in New York that he owned, on paper anyway, for a profit of $32 M.

That doesn’t sound like a guy who needs to put a line of credit on his house to pay $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.

*Follow the money*

New York Times article on Cohen seemed to suggest he was quite wealthy.  

[Martell Spy]

Adam Schiff Lays Out His Colleagues’ Plan to Oust Robert Mueller

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/adam-schiff-lays-out-his-colleagues-plan-to-oust-robert-mueller.html

Quote

 

You’re basically saying that your colleagues are hoping to force Rosenstein’s hand to either give away evidence that will interfere with the investigation and make public that evidence, or refuse them in a way that would lead them to claim that Rosenstein should be impeached.

Without a question. Most recently they asked for the Comey memos, and they were quite indignant in not getting the Comey memos. What they didn’t reveal, of course, is that we had already had access to the Comey memos. I had already read the Comey memos, and the chairman already had the opportunity to read the memos. Now, whether he took the opportunity or not—the chairman seems to ask for a lot of things and demand them and then not read them—but we already had access, so we knew that the Comey memos were completely consistent with the director and what he was saying in his testimony.

They were hoping for a fight, and they didn’t get it. The Justice Department decided, “OK, we’ll give you the memos.” So then they moved onto the next fight, “OK, we want to see the document in unredacted form that initiated the investigation.” And they were hoping for a fight on that, because that’s even more sensitive. And ultimately, the Justice Department relented again, and they didn’t get their fight. Now they’ve moved onto other things and the goal is to keep asking until they can force the Justice Department to say no. You already saw the president in lockstep say, “Why won’t the Justice Department give the Congress what it’s asking for, what are they hiding? I said I wasn’t going to be involved, but I might have to get involved.” It’s a clearly choreographed effort to give the president and his team a pretext to fire Rod Rosenstein. When this chapter of history is written about our country, it will be damning of the president but it will reserve a special damnation for people in Congress that are complicit in the tearing apart of our institutions and undermining of our systems of checks and balances.

 

 

[maarsen]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

How would they get out of the agreements though if the terms haven’t been violated and/or Trump’s legal team won’t agree to undo them? I’m not the lawyer here, but I don’t see a path for them to get out of them. I think Avenatti is just continuing to bait and troll Trump.  

The fact that the terms of the agreement are now public knowledge means someone has violated the agreement. If the violation did not come from Stormy Daniels or her team, then she is well within her rights to talk about the deal, as she is not the one who violated it.

[maarsen]

52 minutes ago, Mexal said:

New York Times article on Cohen seemed to suggest he was quite wealthy.  

Actually the article said he sold a lot of assets for big money but somehow he never seemed to be any farther ahead.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Pony Empress Jace said:

They don't even have to say anything. They can just discuss cum shots with Stormy on her new CNN program "45 and President"

The Jace’s mind is a lecherous one, just as I instructed it to.

1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

1.  You might could find a judge that would find them void as against public policy.

2.  You might could find a billionaire willing to bankroll the penalty

1). How exactly could a judge void the contract without evidence of foul play?

2). Yeah, I’ve always speculated that could happen. If you’re a billionaire who hates Trump, what’s a couple million bucks to do serious damage to him? Well, serious in normal times anyways. Just imagine the reaction if it came out that Obama had affairs with two adult film stars while Michelle was at home nursing their newborn child.

 

[Morpheus]

Oliver North is the new NRA prez. Now there is a man who was always responsible with guns.

[mormont]

By the way, I'm enjoying Rudy Giuliani's continuing efforts on Trump's legal team. Let me see if I have the story right according to the several interviews he's given so far:

- Of course Trump knew about the payment to Stormy Daniels.

- But he gave Cohen the money back.

- And he did it for personal reasons, so it's OK.

- And also for political reasons, obviously.

- No, wait, forget that bit.

- But this is completely everyday business for celebrities anyway.

- Also he might have paid off other women.

- But he might not.

- Anyway, he's going to take the Fifth.

Glad we've got that all sorted out.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

13 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The Jace’s mind is a lecherous one, just as I instructed it to.

1). How exactly could a judge void the contract without evidence of foul play?

2). Yeah, I’ve always speculated that could happen. If you’re a billionaire who hates Trump, what’s a couple million bucks to do serious damage to him? Well, serious in normal times anyways. Just imagine the reaction if it came out that Obama had affairs with two adult film stars while Michelle was at home nursing their newborn child.

 

There is a legal doctrine (contra bona mores) that a contract can be found void if, even though it protects a particular party, the court finds that enforcing the contract would harm society as a whole.  So, for instance, my understanding is that noncompetes in California, unless they have very specific terms, are often found void as against public policy (not a CA lawyer but have so heard).  This has to do with speech (and involves a prominent public figure).  Depending on the conditions and, e.g., whether the revelation comes in the form of a subpoena in another action in which the person has a choice between testifying truly and breaking the NDA, I don't know what the judge would find..... 

[DMC]

18 minutes ago, Morpheus said:

Oliver North is the new NRA prez. Now there is a man who was always responsible with guns.

They're just after his hidden gold.

[Yukle]

33 minutes ago, mormont said:

By the way, I'm enjoying Rudy Giuliani's continuing efforts on Trump's legal team. Let me see if I have the story right according to the several interviews he's given so far:

- Of course Trump knew about the payment to Stormy Daniels.

- But he gave Cohen the money back.

- And he did it for personal reasons, so it's OK.

- And also for political reasons, obviously.

- No, wait, forget that bit.

- But this is completely everyday business for celebrities anyway.

- Also he might have paid off other women.

- But he might not.

- Anyway, he's going to take the Fifth.

Glad we've got that all sorted out.

Also Mueller won't subpoena him. But when he does, the President can't be subpoenaed anyway. Crooked Hillary wouldn't have been interviewed under oath. And anyone who says differently is part of the liberal fake news mainstream media.

[DMC]

41 minutes ago, mormont said:

By the way, I'm enjoying Rudy Giuliani's continuing efforts on Trump's legal team. Let me see if I have the story right according to the several interviews he's given so far:

Just wanna say, this was an impressively pithy breakdown.  Almost Hemingway-esque.  Ironically, if Rudy could adopt even a portion of such a style on cable news, he might not be in such trouble.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

43 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

There is a legal doctrine (contra bona mores) that a contract can be found void if, even though it protects a particular party, the court finds that enforcing the contract would harm society as a whole.  So, for instance, my understanding is that noncompetes in California, unless they have very specific terms, are often found void as against public policy (not a CA lawyer but have so heard).  This has to do with speech (and involves a prominent public figure).  Depending on the conditions and, e.g., whether the revelation comes in the form of a subpoena in another action in which the person has a choice between testifying truly and breaking the NDA, I don't know what the judge would find..... 

Now my head hurts 

Jokes aside, I think I follow. The trouble is determining if what's in the NDAs amounts to a harm against society. I'm assuming the judge would get to read the NDAs to determine if the information within rises to that. My gut instinct is to say that the judge would rule in the president's favor absent the fact that the NDAs existed to hide crimes. I'm not sure how a hush money deal to cover an affair would amount to being a harm to society, considering we all ready know that Trump is guilty of said charges. 

[Paladin of Ice]

Ohio, one of the states most heavily gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, is putting forth a bipartisan plan to reform gerrymandering in the state. The politicians mostly seem to be intent on sidestepping other, more ambitious reforms by putting this one out there, (and sidestepping continually having to fight and fund such initiatives one way or the other) but despite the imperfections it has and the lack of an independent panel, it's still at least a step up from the state's current system.

Quote

A strange thing will happen during Tuesday’s Ohio primary election: One of the most pro-Republican-gerrymandered states in the country will put an actual bipartisan deal to reform gerrymandering in front of its voters.

Issue 1, or the Congressional Redistricting Procedures Amendment, will be up for a statewide vote, and its prospects look good. Three months ago, it got overwhelming support in the state House and passed the state Senate unanimously. Both party establishments are on board with the reform, as are business and labor groups in the state. And activist groups are generally either supportive or neutral.
“There’s no organized opposition that we know of,” says Keary Mc Carthy, who’s working on the bipartisan campaign in favor of the measure.

So why would the Ohio Republican Party — which has controlled the governorship, dominates the state legislature, and drew the maps of its dreams in 2010 — sign on to a deal that could limit its power to gerrymander in the future?

The answer lies in the plan itself. Under it, the legislature would have to try to come up with a new map supported by a big bipartisan majority. If they fail, however, a one-party map could still pass — but it would now expire after four years, rather than the current 10.
Reformers see this as a clear improvement on the status quo, which gave the minority party little recourse. The Ohio GOP, though, sees it mostly as a way to preserve that status quo — fearing that if they didn’t cut a deal for here, a more radical measure could have gained support and passed through a separate ballot initiative.

“I think it largely enshrines the process that we have,” says Republican state Sen. Matt Huffman. “It still leaves it in the hands of the majority party in the legislature, because people elected the majority party to make these decisions. But it also enshrines the concept of minority rights.”

The current rules for how congressional redistricting happens in Ohio are simple: The state legislature can pass a plan, and the governor can sign or veto it, just like any ordinary bill. That means that if one party has majorities in both the state House and state Senate, as well as the governorship, they can gerrymander to their heart’s content.

That’s exactly what Republicans did after their 2010 landslide victories in the state. As David Daley describes in his book Ratf**ked, the GOP rented a room in the Columbus Doubletree for months to draft a plan in secret. In the next election, 2012, President Barack Obama won in Ohio — yet Republicans won 12 of the state’s 16 congressional districts under the new map. They did so with only 52 percent of the statewide US House vote.

Since then, the partisan breakdown of the state’s congressional delegation has remained unchanged. The 2014 GOP landslide and Donald Trump’s surprisingly large 2016 win in the state led to the same partisan outcome in the same districts. And the Brennan Center has found that Ohio has one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country.

Yet unlike in many other GOP-controlled gerrymandered states, reform has come on the agenda in Ohio in recent years. Part of this, of course, is due to efforts of groups like the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, which have spent years pushing for reform.

But some leading Republicans also displayed a surprising openness to dealmaking. After the 2014 elections, Huffman — then a Republican state House member who had played a key role in passing the recent gerrymandered maps — introduced redistricting reform plans for both congressional and state legislature maps. “One of the things that I came away with personally was there’s gotta be a better way of doing this,” he says.

...

Ohio Republicans had defeated such ballot initiatives before — most recently in 2012, when a sweeping redistricting reform went down to defeat by a 26 percentage point margin. Huffman helped engineer that defeat. “One of my jobs in 2012 was to go around the state and raise money to beat back that ballot initiative,” he says. “A lot of people gave us money, and we did beat it back. But a lot of those people said, ‘Can you fix this? Because we don’t want to keep having this same fight.’”

But this time around, the midterm environment began to look increasingly challenging for Republicans, just as the new ballot initiative was gaining steam. “We had the specter that it could go on the ballot,” Huffman said. “We knew then we’d have to raise $10 or $12 million. Maybe we’d beat it back, maybe not. But that’s money we wouldn’t have been able to spend on Republican House races and other things.”

Issue 1, if approved, would create a new congressional redistricting process that would proceed in a series of stages designed to incentivize bipartisan agreement.

To start off, the Ohio legislature would be tasked with drawing a new map. But they could no longer pass it with a simple majority vote. They’d need three-fifths support and the support of at least half the members of both major parties, in each chamber, as well as the governor’s signature.

If there’s no deal, the congressional map-drawing would be punted over to the seven-member Ohio commission that exists to handle the state legislature’s redistricting. Here, again, bipartisanship would be necessary — at least two minority-party members would have to agree to approve a new map.

If the commission fails, the job would be tossed back to the Ohio legislature. In that case, the threshold for success would fall, but bipartisanship would still be necessary to pass a map — at least one-third of each party’s members would have to vote for it, to pass it and send it for the governor’s signature.

Finally, if all these efforts fail, the legislature would be permitted to pass a map with simple majority support. But the catch is that this new map would only last four years, rather than the usual 10. And again, the governor’s signature would be required.

Issue 1 has other reforms too. It restricts how often counties and other local governmental units in the state can be split up in the new map, and declares that any plan must not “unduly” favor or disfavor a political party or its incumbents.