Avenatti Docs Leak: Got $8 Million out of Thin Air When Stormy Arrived

Lawyer and/or media gadabout Michael Avenatti has thus far provided a great deal of the comic relief in l’affaire Stormy Daniels, but there are a surprising number of serious questions about him that remain unanswered. . .

In spite of the fact that Avenatti’s appearances on cable news seem more frequent than takeoffs at LaGuardia, we don’t have any answers to these questions — nor indeed does anyone on CNN or MSNBC feel particularly inclined to ask them. They just assume that it’s none of their business and move along their merry way.

As humorously Biff Tanner-like as that terse statement may be, there are several problems with it. First, while he’s busy banging journalists’ heads against the wall so that they’ll read what he had to say, he probably should instruct his own client to read it, since her own statements in the matter directly contradict this. And second, it doesn’t explain why he seems to have come into $8 million as the Daniels case began to explode earlier this year . . .

Barnes looked up some tax information on Avenatti’s law firm and found he hadn’t paid any taxes for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016, even though filings in a bankruptcy court said that during that period the firm earned a whopping $30 million.

“In January 2018, (Michael Avenatti) got an unidentified source of income that allowed him to pay $4.85M to his law firm employees he defrauded, close to $2M in back taxes for payroll taxes on his law firm, and near another $1M to other creditors,” Barnes tweeted.

In December 2014, #Avenatti decided to quit paying most taxes. He failed to even file his law firm's income tax returns for 2014, 2015, and 2016, though a lawyer's detailed filings in his bankruptcy court report his firm made over $30M in income in that time. IRS records confirm. pic.twitter.com/ytNXBaSKZ5

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) May 13, 2018