He is, for lack of a better comparison, the Donald Trump of lawyering.
.. A walk through Mr. Kasowitz’s office at Kasowitz Benson Torres in Midtown shows magazine covers and framed pictures of him. He’s quick to tell you about his latest accomplishment and never shies from publicity. The first paragraph of the online biography on his firm’s website, before mentioning any of his work, cites the dozens of media outlets that have written about him, and how they have described him as the “toughest lawyer on Wall Street,” an “uberlitigator” and “the toughest of the tough guys.”
.. In case you didn’t get the message, he likes a good fight, the nastier the better.
.. Mr. Kasowitz was largely responsible for helping Liggett settle the huge class action suits it faced over the health impact of tobacco
.. Mr. Kasowitz’s firm was on the other side of Mr. Icahn in a dispute over casinos. The client? Mr. Trump, along with his daughter Ivanka.
.. Mr. Kasowitz recently added Sberbank, a Russian state-controlled bank, as a client in a case that accused it of conspiring to take over a Russian granite company — and asserting that the conspiracy involved lieutenants of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The complaint called it a “textbook case of Russian corporate raiding.”
The big question in Washington is whether Mr. Kasowitz, who is not a criminal lawyer or a political hand, is the right person to be at Mr. Trump’s side. Some of Mr. Trump’s friends and advisers have privately raised questions about his hiring.
.. he does know about Mr. Trump — and he does know about the news media and the 24-hour news cycle.
.. He’s currently representing Bill O’Reilly
.. Mr. Kasowitz sent a letter to the paper threatening to sue over the publication of accusations from two women that Mr. Trump sexually harassed them.
.. Mr. Kasowitz’s law partner, David M. Friedman, was Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel.
.. And another of Mr. Kasowitz’s partners — one of his newest — is Joseph I. Lieberman
.. “I don’t read much. Mostly I read contracts, but usually my lawyers do most of the work.”
s As president, Trump’s legacy of lawsuits and minimal briefings isn’t helping
As President Trump manages his latest crises, he is turning to strategies from his tumultuous business career: rely on family and a few trusted advisers, demand absolute loyalty from those beyond the inner circle, threaten opponents with legal action, and insist on bare-bones briefings.
.. His threats — such as tweeting that fired FBI Director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” — have often backfired.
.. “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience”
.. Trump’s view of Washington is rooted in deep distrust of government authority, stemming from the day in 1973 when the Justice Department sued him and his father for racial bias
.. When judges suspended his entry ban that mostly affected Muslim travelers and immigrants, he attacked judges and vowed to “see you in court,” just as he had during his business career.
.. Trump often deployed a tactic of telling others that he was taping their conversations and monitoring their work, and threatening to file lawsuits or to reduce payments owed to contractors. By suggesting that he had secretly recorded his dinner conversation with Comey, Trump apparently hoped to prevent the fired FBI director from speaking negatively about him.
.. Flynn’s firing took 18 days from the time that acting attorney general Sally Yates warned White House Counsel Donald McGahn that Flynn had compromised himself
.. McGahn is the nephew of Patrick “Paddy” McGahn, who once was Trump’s lawyer.
.. Paddy McGahn “was one of the few people that just didn’t care and would say anything to Trump,” O’Donnell said in a telephone interview. “He was a fixer, getting out in front of things, issues that might come, before they turned into problems.”
.. A former White House lawyer who has spoken to McGahn said the counsel ill served the president if he did not make it sound like an emergency.
.. there are concerns that McGahn, unlike his uncle, was reluctant to stand up to Trump.
.. He often paired the lawsuits with verbal vitriol, seeking to intimidate those he sued. While Trump keeps up the vitriol in the White House with his use of Twitter
Bill O’Reilly’s Self-Aggrandizing Sense of Persecution
the portrait that has emerged of Fox News as a geriatric frat party where the rewards for being a top dog included ogling, propositioning, and groping the women who worked there, from clerical temps to news producers to star anchors like Megyn Kelly.
.. five women who had accused O’Reilly, now sixty-seven years old, of harassment that included “verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.”
.. More than one said that O’Reilly had threatened to wreck their careers
.. Fox producer Andrea Mackris told the Times that O’Reilly vowed that if she complained about his behavior, he’d make her “pay so dearly” that she’d “wish she’d never been born.”
An internal Fox investigation turned up still more accusations
.. O’Reilly’s self-aggrandizing temper, his fondness for the phrase “shut up” when he’s speaking to or about people he deems insufficiently patriotic or submissive.
.. someone with a personality not unlike our President’s—thin-skinned and pugnacious, with a tendency to treat women as chattel.
.. The book, which my colleague Jia Tolentino recently wrote about, recounts, in gory detail, the murderous rampage unleashed by a pugnacious Irish-American news anchor after he is fired.
.. You’re either Old School or you’re a Snowflake—no in-betweens
.. “Instead Mr. O’Reilly blamed others, embracing the victimization he so ridiculed of the American left.”
.. Bosses who treat their workplaces as their harems are, among other things, lazy. They can’t be bothered with taking the time and effort to get to know someone well enough to, for example, tell whether that person might at all be interested in having sex with them. They crudely leverage their power over people’s livelihoods rather than courting them
.. his new mode regarding the sexual-harassment allegations against him—to drop cryptic little references that create a sense of persecution and of the supposed silencing of conservative voices.
Trump and his aides take hard line on border wall, as threat of government shutdown looms
Mulvaney has said that the administration is willing to negotiate with Democrats — funding insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in exchange for support for wall funding.
.. “The White House gambit to hold hostage health care for millions of Americans, in order to force American taxpayers to foot the bill for a wall that the President said would be paid for by Mexico is a complete non-starter,”
.. Further complicating matters for the White House, some Republicans in Congress say they don’t view wall funding as a must-have item in a short term spending bill.
.. Meanwhile, the Trump administration plans to release a very general sketch of its tax reform plan this week, Mulvaney said.
“I think what are you going to see Wednesday is some specific governing principles, some guidance,” he said, explaining that the White House will not release specific legislative text. “Also some indications of what the rates are going to be.”
Asked whether the plan will be revenue-neutral, Mulvaney replied, “I don’t think we’ve decided that part yet.”