How convenient would it be for Mr. Trump if some money he paid Cohen in the past could be ascribed to function as the money that ultimately paid off Stephanie Clifford for her silence? And how helpful would it be if it could be also help create doubt as to whether Trump was buying the silence of a liar or a truth-teller, and if he even knew he was doing it at all!?
Well, apparently the glorious Team Defend Duh Preznit has stumbled on a retainer fee/slush fund arrangement that can be shoehorned into doing something approximate to that exact thing!
One thing we learned through the lumps we’ve taken in both Iran/Contra and trying to keep Planned Parenthood funded is: Money is motherfucking fungible. Ain’t it grand? The short and skinny on that is that apparently Cohen, as DT’s “fixer,” ran a nasty little slush fund on his behalf to do God only knows what. We have some evidence of other mistresses being paid off, and allegations of strong men threatening people. So the money was coming and going through that fund fairly frequently.
Well, shucks, if I didn’t know better and I only looked at that one $130,000 payment, you could call that cash flow a “retainer,” and I would barely recognize it for the “black ops” cash-on-hand that it is.
See, a day at the laundry, heavy on the spin cycle, a pinch of Giuliani and some blood of Bannon, and we have a legally defensible description of what you can’t prove didn’t happen!
If you parse out those follow-up tweets from Trump, they clearly flesh out and support this new strategy. I know his base is already on board with whatever he did with and to and against Stephanie Clifford. I sure hope the news media starts unwinding this asap, and it gives Trump and his cronies no cover and protection from his bad actions either in the courts or with the American people.