Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti has made it his business to troll both Donald Trump and Michael Cohen and he is a master of all media necessary to do so effectively. Avenatti said this to Jake Tapper today. Talking Points Memo:
“I strongly believe that within the next 90 days we’re going to see an unsealing of an indictment against Mr. Cohen for a host of very serious offenses, and I believe, Jake, that is going to be a significant domino that’s going to fall in connection with this,” Avenatti said told CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday.
“I think he can be indicted for bank fraud, wire fraud, campaign finance violations,” Avenatti added. “I think there is a whole host of potential criminal conduct that could be charged. According to his attorneys, the FBI seized thousands if not millions of pages of documents in connection with the raids going back some 30 years. This guy is radioactive right now, and this is not going to end well.”
Avenatti said Clifford is set to attend the Monday hearing at which Cohen will present a client list to U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, part of his attempt to argue that documents seized in the raids are protected under attorney-client privilege.
Meanwhile, Cohen is getting scrutiny from many other directions and all at once. In the now famous photograph taken yesterday of a chilled Cohen smoking cigars on the terrace with his compadres while his lawyer was taking a beating in court, at least one face has been definitely identified, that of Rotem Rosen. Rosen was married at Mar-a-Lago to Zina Sapir, whose father is a friend of Donald Trump who sells electronics to KGB agents. Politico via TPM:
...the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.
Who is Lev Leviev? Haaretz:
Leviev was a business partner of Prevezon Holdings, the Russian firm that was accused of money-laundering, and that, after it was represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya, got off with a $6 million slap on the wrist. The Prevezon scam had been exposed in 2009 by Russian whistleblower accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who a short time later died in a Moscow prison under suspicious conditions. It was his death that led to the American passage of the sanctions – in the form of the Magnitsky Act – that Veselnitskaya said she was lobbying to have cancelled when she met with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and others at Trump Tower last summer. It was to avenge the Magnitsky sanctions that Putin in 2012 abruptly prohibited American citizens from adopting any more children from Russia; readers will remember that Trump has said that “adoptions” was the subject of his off-the-record second conversation with Putin at the G-20 meeting in Hamburg two weeks ago. Now, the Justice Department’s decision to settle with Prevezon last May is likely to come under renewed scrutiny by investigators in the U.S.
The Guardian this week reported [July 25, 2017] on several joint business ventures that Prevezon undertook with Leviev’s Africa-Israel Investments, both in the U.S. and Europe, and which were later alleged to be vehicles for money-laundering by Prevezon.
In 2015, the Kushner real-estate company purchased four floors of the old New York Times building, on West 43rd St., for $295 million. The seller was Lev Leviev’s U.S. branch of Africa-Israel Investments, in partnership with Five Mile Capital. According to the Washington Post, Kushner took a loan from Deutsche Bank in October 2016 – a month before Election Day – to refinance the Manhattan property, which was now valued at $74 million above what he paid for it a year earlier.
Interesting how money laundering is a recurring theme when it comes to Trump family activities, both here and abroad, isn’t it? Not to mention how when large sums of money are mentioned, somehow Jared Kushner’s investments come up as well? Expect Donald Trump to start rage tweeting “no money laundering, no money laundering!” any day now. It may become the refrain to his personal anthem of “no collusion.”
In all events, Michael Cohen goes to court tomorrow, Stormy Daniels will be in the gallery, and the Comey book hits the stands on Tuesday. Stock the snacks and brewskies because the circus is in town. Donald Trump is going to be destroyed by the very medium that made him, television, and it’s going to be so satisfying to watch.