By The Daily Wire. In an op-ed for The Hill, Mark Penn — who served as a pollster and adviser for Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2000 and a chief strategist for Hillary’s 2008 campaign — asks a question that most mainstream media outlets don’t seem interested in asking: “So exactly who is paying Michael Avenatti?”
Penn follows his should-be obvious question with the natural follow-up: Is Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, who has become the nemesis of Donald Trump’s embattled personal lawyer Michael Cohen, “a lawyer, an opposition researcher, a journalist, or a campaign operative?”
Avenatti, Penn notes, wants to keep the discussion focused on Cohen and where he got his money, but if Avenatti wants to keep things on the up and up, he needs to tell us who is paying for his services because his porn star client has made clear that she most definitely is not. He also needs to reveal his sources for the confidential banking information about Cohen he revealed to all the world in a memo this week, and tell us if he is “solely representing Stormy Daniels or just using her as cover to wage a political operation.”
“From the beginning, this has been fishy,” writes Penn. “Daniels’s previous lawyer advised her to stick to her agreements. In contrast, Avenatti okayed her violating with impunity her non-disclosure agreement on ’60 Minutes’ despite a binding arbitration judgment against her. She acknowledged on Twitter that she is not paying for her lawyer. So who is? And did he indemnify her against all multimillion-dollar penalties?” (Read more from “Clinton Insider Asks Question About Stormy Daniels’ Lawyer the Media Refuses to Ask” HERE)
____________________________________________________
Who Is Paying Michael Avenatti?
By The Hill. . .It took a long time and even a court battle to find out that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the Fusion GPS dossier, a fact that was disclosed only after the damage was done, as former British spy and the dossier’s compiler, Christopher Steele, had already created a vast echo chamber as though the material he was peddling had been verified in some way, which of course, it never was. Now Avenatti is being allowed to repeat this same process, mixing truths with half truths and evading accountability.
This week, Avenatti released to the media a report detailing consulting payments to Cohen, and much of it, despite a few errors, has been verified. AT&T, Novartis and a real estate firm acknowledge having hired the president’s personal attorney for insights on the incoming administration. Mueller appears to have investigated all of this months ago, and it is highly unlikely that the theory Avenatti is pounding away at — that Russians paid for Daniels — holds any water or Robert Mueller would not have passed the investigation on to U.S. attorneys in New York. Russia, actually, is the special counsel’s bailiwick.
It seems that everyone has his or her own theory about where the Daniels payment came from. Rudy Giuliani says it came out the president’s monthly retainer. Cohen said he paid for it. Avenatti speculates it comes from a real estate company that he alleges had ties, of course, to Russia. The Wall Street Journal published an article suggesting that Cohen and his family in 2015 and early 2016 were so prescient that he would need money for Trump women that he and his wife were refinancing their homes to build up cash for this purpose, possibly defrauding the banks.
More relevant, perhaps, is the New York Times story that Cohen had invested heavily in New York City taxi medallions and, thanks to Uber, those medallions were losing as much as 80 percent of their value and cash flow. There is a much more logical explanation for Cohen needing cash in that these investments were going south, and he needed funds to shore them up or face foreclosure. (Read more from “Who Is Paying Michael Avenatti?” HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
