The biggest scandal in US political history now offers yet another opportunity for Trump to fund raise, because conflict is a profit center under a strategy of tension. Who wouldn’t want to support an ongoing (non-) criminal enterprise that has global reach. And how best to rationalize that discourse but by its most statutory practitioners. Trump’s staff might not have the same resources as Agent Orange to defend themselves, and they’re as stuck as when “Donald Trump … backed off from his pledge to pay the legal fees of supporters who attack protesters at his rallies” … because loyalty.
President Trump has reportedly narrowed down the list of possible outside legal counsel candidates to serve amid the ongoing probes into Russian meddling in last year's election to four finalists.
A list of the finalists emerged Monday, four people briefed on the discussions told The Washington Post.
Trump and his advisers allegedly hope to scout out and attract top lawyers across several law firms, who would work together to guide Trump through the congressional and federal investigations.
The probes are also looking into whether Trump campaign aides colluded with Moscow.
While the list could still be changed or modified, sources told the Post that the top contenders currently include Robert Giuffra Jr., Marc Kasowitz, Theodore Olson and Reid Weingarten.
- Kasowitz, a partner at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman in New York, is expected to take a top role on the outside legal team. He has known Trump for a long time and represented him in multiple cases.
- Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Trump’s reported top choice for FBI director, currently works at the same law firm as Kasowitz, which critics have pointed to as a possible conflict of interest, as the agency is conducting one of the Russia investigations.
President Donald Trump has deep pockets to pay for personal lawyers to defend him from the evolving federal investigation into his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials. It’s a very different story for his staff.
White House aides bracing for subpoenas and grand jury summons have already begun making inquiries for legal help to navigate the unfamiliar terrain, according to lawyers who have been contacted, opening critical lines of communication in a bid to avoid serious harm to their reputations and careers, and perhaps even jail time.
This old joke will become truer soon ...
A Russian, a Cuban, an American and a lawyer are in a train. The Russian takes a bottle of the best vodka out of his pack; pours some into a glass, drinks it, and says: "In Russia, we have the best vodka in the world, nowhere in the world you can find vodka as good as what we produce in Ukraine. And we have so much of it, that we can just throw it away...". Saying that, he opens the window and throws the rest of the bottle out the window.
All the others are quite impressed.
The Cuban opens a box of Havanas, takes one of them, lights it and begins to smoke it saying: "In Cuba, we have the best cigars of the world: Havanas. Nowhere in the world are there better cigars, and we have so many of them, that we can just throw them away...". Saying that, he throws the box of Havanas out the window.
One more time, everybody is quite impressed.
The American just stands up, opens the window, and throws the lawyer out...
A semi-hostile foreign government, controlled by a former KGB strongman and his inner-circle kleptocrats, weaponized the use of social media, disinformation and malicious hacking to interfere with our presidential election. And suspicion is mounting that the winning candidate, along with many of his closest advisers, may have criminally collaborated with this foreign government in that endeavor. Likewise, this winning candidate apparently has deep yet undisclosed financial ties, including possible money-laundering scams, with this foreign government and its various wealthy plutocrats…
Most of what we hear from Louise Mensch has to do with process and legal maneuvering, along with speculation about the roster of Trump associates who might have connections to Russia that may or may not be dubious in nature. Oh yeah, some of the Team Mensch rumors have turned out to be accurate. Meanwhile, Schindler has been warning us about the relationship between Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks for at least four years. Beyond Team Mensch, Maddow’s nightly coverage has either been verified or will likely soon be so either by peer-duplicated reporting or the investigations themselves.
By the way, remember Maddow’s loony-sounding stories about Trump’s connections to Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian “Fertilizer King?” Trump’s lawyers have verified that one. Some of those reports have not been traditional journalism, but they could well trigger additional reporting by traditional journalists, thereby revealing a side of a story we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. We should also be prepared to learn that some of Team Mensch’s reporting will fall apart. Hell, at some point, The Washington Post might get one or two stories wrong as well. Woodward and Bernstein had at least one major clinker in the mix, too. Stay tuned.
No, this is an investigation about one thing: the now-undeniable fact that a Russian espionage conspiracy accomplished an objective that has never previously occurred in American history — compromising the highest levels of US government, penetrating the White House, establishing influence and leverage over the president’s national security adviser and planting false information with the vice president of the United States — who then, wittingly or unwittingly, repeated those fictions to the American people…
If the most powerful figures in our government can be duped into self-destruction as easily as this, none of our secrets are safe, the words of our leaders are unreliable and the most basic sense of judgment by our president is in doubt…
Still unknown, though, are the answers to three crucial questions which will ultimately decide the fate of the current presidency:
- QUESTION 1: What did President Donald Trump know, and when did he know it? Most importantly, when did he know that his selection for national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had illegally communicated on Dec. 29, 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and lied about it to other officials in the Trump White House?
- QUESTION 2: Did the Russian spy conspiracy directly reach and compromise President Trump himself? Most importantly, did he encourage Flynn to communicate illegally with Russians, or know about it after the fact and do nothing?
- QUESTION 3: Did President Trump take actions to thwart the FBI investigation into the Russian conspiracy — in an effort to conceal that one or more members of his White House staff were compromised, or to hide his own illegal conduct? If so, do his actions rise to the level of obstruction of justice?
What legal discourse adds to this is that the value of such fictions in discourse becomes an economic matter which goes to material motivation and intent that are features and not bugs in the institutional economics of neoliberal capitalism.
Answer 1: Three; one to do it and two to sue him for malpractice.
Answer 2: It only takes one lawyer to change your light bulb to his light bulb.
Answer 3: You won't find a lawyer who can change a light bulb. Now, if you're looking for a lawyer to screw a light bulb...
Answer 4: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part (Light Bulb) shall be removed from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the second part (Light Bulb) and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the parties. The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be limited to, the following steps….
www.quora.com/...