It is almost certainly too late for Trump to stop Stormy Daniels’s ‘60 Minutes’ interview

President Trump is probably powerless to stop “60 Minutes” from airing an interview with the porn star who claims to have had an affair with him, according to legal experts.

.. “She’s already given the interview,” said defamation attorney Megan C. Deluhery, a partner at Todd & Weld in Boston. “CBS would need to be a party to the suit to be restrained from airing the interview, and since the obligation on Ms. Daniels arose as part of a private settlement, I don’t see much legal basis to enjoin CBS

.. Although a judge might rule that Daniels must stay quiet until the lawsuit reaches a conclusion, an injunction would not undo the interview she gave last week or compel CBS to pretend it didn’t happen.

.. To thwart “60 Minutes,” Trump would need to secure a separate order against CBS — a prior restraint of speech that legal precedent suggests is unconstitutional.

.. the president’s lawyers would have to convince a court that “whatever is about to be aired would cause immediate, irreparable harm to the U.S. If the Pentagon Papers didn’t meet that standard, can’t imagine that this ’60 Minutes’ segment with Stormy Daniels would.”

.. Trump can hope that the prospect of a libel suit will scare CBS out of airing the interview, or he can hope that further reporting will cause “60 Minutes” to conclude that Daniels is not credible and thus abandon the interview for journalistic reasons. Otherwise, he probably cannot keep the interview off the air.

The First Porn President

He actually took time out from showing Stormy a picture of himself on the cover of a magazine, according to her interview in In Touch Weekly, to ask her about her own work in the porn industry.

“He was very curious,” she said. “Not necessarily about the sex or anything like that, but business questions.” Like how much she made off royalties from the movies.

.. When she asked what was up with his hair, he laughed with her about it. He gave her his ultimate compliment, comparing her to Ivanka. And he didn’t ask to do anything kinky.

.. Oddly, for such a germaphobe, he did not use a condom, she said.

.. The Stormy episode is exactly the kind of embarrassing episode that Trump wiggled out of for decades, denying that he knew women who accused him, playing the legal and media angles to kill stories, getting the help of friends and employees to pay off women.

But times have dramatically changed, post-Weinstein.

.. The White House will keep trying to dismiss Daniels as she is on her “Make America Horny Again” tour, but she’s not going away. As Muddy Waters famously sang the blues, “They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad; Wednesday’s worse, and Thursday’s also sad.”

How Sane Is Sam Nunberg? How Sane Are Any of These People?

Sam Nunberg appeared on CNN, and towards the end of a wild and wide-ranging interview with Jake Tapper, he seemed to ask the host for legal advice on whether he should comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller.

“Do you think I should cooperate? Should I spend 80 hours going over my emails, Jake?” Nunberg asked.

.. It’s really rare for an interview subject to ask a journalist for legal advice — and speaking as a journalist, I’d say it’s an astonishingly bad idea too.

.. “I’m not a Donald Trump fan, as I told you before, okay? He treated me like crap,” and, “Trump may have very well done something during the election with the Russians, and if you find it out if he did that, I don’t know. If he did that, you know what, it’s inexcusable.”

.. It is not often we get to watch, live on television, a man simultaneously risk contempt of court and antagonize the one man who can pardon him.

.. CNN’s Erin Burnett awkwardly told Nunberg on-air that she could smell alcohol on him; Nunberg denied he had been drinking.

.. Page is the strange kind of man who is smart enough to get a master’s degree from Georgetown University and become an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch, but not smart enough to bring a lawyer with him when he testifies to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, or Mueller’s grand jury.

.. In October, Page agreed to appear on the program of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes — light-years away from being a “friendly interviewer” — and his answers were so breathtakingly forward that Hayes was left in disbelief: “I genuinely hope, Carter, that you are innocent of everything, because you are doing a lot of talking.”

.. Perhaps we could push aside Nunberg and Page and give the award for most self-destructive former Trump adviser to Steve Bannon, who invited Michael Wolff into the White House to gather material for his book Fire and Fury and seemed to think he could trash the president’s children on the record and live to tell the tale.

.. a president who
It’s as if the White House mess is serving Tide Pods.
.. Ed Markey claimed, without any evidence, that a “grand jury has been impaneled up in New York” to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russians.
..  Congressman Ted Lieu speculated that a Republican campaign staffer’s suicide was secretly a result of foul play stemming from a conversation with former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
.. People are asking, “How sane is Nunberg?” How sane are any of these people? How are cable-news networks supposed to assess the mental health of a former presidential aide when the baseline for “sane” has been adjusted downward so rapidly?

New evidence the Stormy Daniels payment may have violated election law

NBC News on Friday reported that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime ally and attorney, had used a Trump Organization email address as he worked to secure the payment to Daniels.

..Trumporg.com redirects to Trump.com. The domain is registered to the Trump Organization. It is, in other words, an email address that belongs to the Trump Organization — an asset of the company.

.. That means that federal election law was almost certainly violated.

.. Daniels’s lawsuit asserts Trump learned she was talking to media outlets shortly after a number of women had come forward to rebut Trump’s denial during the Oct. 10, 2016, presidential debate that he had groped women as he had implied in the famous “Access Hollywood” tape. Hearing that she might tell her story, too, Trump “sought to silence” her, “thus helping to ensure he won the Presidential Election.”

.. The email from the bank to Cohen does not prove that company funds were used to pay Daniels, which Noble told us last month would itself be illegal. Just using that email address is its own problem.

.. even if what happened with Daniels was the sort of thing that was very common for Cohen as part of his duties, the Daniels scenario could still be a contribution if Cohen understood it would aid Trump’s electoral effort.

.. he used his Trump Organization email for any number things.

“I sent emails from the Trump Org email address to my family, friends as well as Trump business emails,” he told the network. “I basically used it for everything. I am certain most people can relate.”

.. Cohen told the network that the funds used to pay Daniels “were taken from my home equity line.” The money, that is, came directly from Cohen. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Cohen told others that he had not been repaid for his investment immediately — meaning that he had, in effect, made a loan to the campaign of some duration by covering this cost.

.. The only way in which Cohen could have paid the $130,000 without having violated campaign finance laws is if he were totally independent of the campaign and, as a private individual, decided to give Daniels the money to buy her silence.

.. To assume that no campaign finance laws were broken means assuming either that:

  1. The payment had nothing to do with the campaign, or
  2. Cohen had nothing to do with the campaign.

Neither seems at all likely.