A persuasive case by Paul Campos that the $1.6 million payout to a Playboy model was not covering up an affair with Elliot Broidy, but with… Donald Trump https://t.co/z14iLQ8bMo
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) May 8, 2018
When this report appeared yesterday, I figured we could wait a bit, see what the professional news media would do with the theory:
…The Wall Street Journal published a story on April 13 revealing the existence of another nondisclosure agreement involving an affair between an adult entertainer and a client of Cohen’s. The NDA employed the pseudonyms David Dennison and Peggy Peterson — the same names used in the Stormy Daniels NDA — and was otherwise very similar to the Trump-Daniels agreement…
Whatever source revealed the existence of this NDA to the Journal also disclosed that, according to another document in Cohen’s office, the Dennison in this agreement was not Donald Trump but rather Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fundraiser, while Peterson was Shera Bechard, Playboy’s Miss November 2010. Apparently, Bechard had been Broidy’s mistress until he got her pregnant, at which point she hired Davidson, who contacted Cohen to demand the payment of hush money.
By a stroke of good fortune, Cohen already had a sex-scandal-with-an-adult-entertainer-hush-money-NDA template in his hard drive, since he had recently drafted at least one for Donald Trump. Indeed, Cohen didn’t even bother to change the pseudonyms. (That economical use of attorney resources explained away what otherwise could have been a very awkward detail in the narrative.)…
Let me offer an alternative explanation of the affair and the payoff. It is still just a hypothesis, but, I would argue, it fits more comfortably with what we know about the various players than the reported version of events: Donald Trump, not Elliott Broidy, had an affair with Shera Bechard. Bechard hired Keith Davidson, who had negotiated both Playboy playmate Karen McDougal’s deal with the National Enquirer and Stormy Daniels’s NDA with Trump. Davidson called Cohen, and the two of them negotiated a $1.6 million payment to Bechard.
At this point Cohen needed to find a funding source. Cohen asserts he took out a home equity loan to come up with a mere $130,000 to pay off Stormy Daniels, so it seems clear he couldn’t have fronted the $1.6 million for the Bechard deal himself. So Cohen reached out to Elliott Broidy, a very rich Republican fundraiser with several pending and highly lucrative business deals with foreign governments: deals that hinged on whether Broidy could convince the U.S. government to take various actions. By stepping up to take responsibility for the affair and to fund the seven-figure settlement, Broidy was ensuring that he could continue to peddle his influence with Trump to governments around the world.
Which is to say, it was a cover-up concealing a bribe. Indeed, it turns out that Broidy not only has a history of bribing public officials, but of bribing them in an uncannily similar fashion to the method which I hypothesize he employed in this case…
People thought the Stormy Daniels story was a tawdry distraction from the Russia story but it turns out it’s all one story
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 8, 2018
So far, not much! Possibly those professional newspeople are busy doing the legwork. Professor Campos has posted a couple of times at his usual outlet, Lawyers Guns & Money:
Imagine the conversation. “You can take this hit a lot easier than me. I’ll do something very nice for you, okay?” pic.twitter.com/MK7ANDXAIf
— Schooley (@Rschooley) May 8, 2018
(Write your own joke about whether a guy like this would be averse to bragging he’d banged a Playboy model)
the other compelling loose thread here: there is no chance in hell Cohen had his office tossed for simple campaign finance crimes – whatever put him on the radar and served as cause for that raid would be enormously illegal, & the Broidy-Cohen-Trump laundering theory would fit
— Kilgore Trout (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 8, 2018
Repeating the obvious:
If a President wanted to swiftly extinguish these increasingly grave questions, why not release even a redacted version of your tax returns to prove some distance between these payments and your lawyer?
— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) May 9, 2018
Russiagate Open Thread: Hey, Remember Elliot Briody’s Girlfriend’s Abortion?…Post + Comments (175)