Reminder: This Is Not Normal – Unhinged President Rants On TV And Hurts His Legal Battles

Ken AshfordL'Affaire Russe, Stormy Daniels & Karen McDougal Affairs, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

The President of the United States went on a rant on Fox & Friends this morning. Trump went on long, loopy, repetitive riffs about how “fake” and “phony” everything is: the Jackson allegations, Comey’s memos, Stormy Daniels’s assertions, the Robert Mueller investigation. The hosts kept trying to bring up Kanye West’s pro-Trump tweets, but all they got were warmed-over campaign lines about how “black unemployment is at the lowest” and how the Republican party is better for African-Americans: “If you go back to the Civil War, it was the Republicans who did the thing.” In Trump-speak, “Did the thing” = “freed the slaves.”

Toward the end, Trump tipped his hand. Asked by Doocy to grade his performance in office, Trump veered off, saying, “I’m fighting a battle … a phony battle … it’s a cloud over my head.” He seemed to be referring to the Mueller probe. “The message now is, ‘It’s a fix.’ I’ve been able to message it.” This is a crucial statement. This is how Trump — and his media handmaiden Fox News — views things. Figure out how you want to interpret facts, twist things to your liking, and then repeat it over and over and over again, thereby “messaging it.” The current message is, “It’s a fix.” What’s fixed? Everything: Mueller, Dr. Jackson’s nomination, the investigation of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels. Listening to Trump this morning was like hearing a week’s worth of Hannity episodes crunched into a half hour. All the same conspiracy theories and twisted logic. For the Fox audience, it works like a charm. It’s what put Trump in office. By the end, Trump, who could not be controlled in any coherent way for the previous 30 minutes, suddenly became friendly and precise. “Ainsley, good luck with your book!” he called out to Earhardt, who’s just published a memoir. Your president of the United States: Useless on articulating policy, great at promotion.

Here’s an example or two:

But this kind of loose talk is why Trump’s lawyers want him to shut up.   Because Trump made a couple of legal flubs.

First, Trump claimed that Cohen — his longtime personal lawyer and fixer — only represented him in “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of his overall legal work.

“Michael is in business — he’s really a businessman, a fairly big business as I understand it, I don’t know his business but this doesn’t have to do with me,” Trump said, attempting to distance himself from Cohen. “Michael is a businessman. He’s got a business, he also practices law. I would say probably the big thing is his business, and they’re looking at something to do with his business. This doesn’t have to do with me. I have many attorneys — sadly, I have so many attorneys you wouldn’t even believe it.”

Trump’s comments come a day after a lawyer representing him told a federal judge that Trump himself “is ready to help recommend what materials seized from his personal attorney that relate to him should be withheld from federal investigators because of attorney-client privilege,” according to the Associated Press.

But Trump’s claim that Cohen only deals with “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of his legal work will likely complicate his lawyers’ efforts to shield seized documents from federal investigators in prosecutors.

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer loved this:

Separately, Cohen told the judge he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to a civil lawsuit brought by Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress who says she had an affair with Trump and is trying to nullify a $130,000 payment she received for for her silence just days before the 2016 election.

Trump acknowledged during the Fox & Friends interview that Cohen did represent him during his dealings with Daniels. Trump recently claimed he had no knowledge of the payment at the time.

“Michael would represent me and represent me on some things,” Trump said. “He represented me like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me. He represented me and you know, from what I see he did absolutely nothing wrong.”

But Cohen’s story about the secret Daniels hush payment — which may have been illegal if it was meant to help Trump’s campaign — is that he made it from his personal funds, without Trump being looped in at all. Trump’s acknowledgement that Cohen “represented me” in the “crazy Stormy Daniels deal” undermines the repeated public claims of his own lawyer.

At another point, Trump accused former FBI director James Comey of lying in memos he wrote about his interactions of Trump before he was fired. In them, Comey claims that Trump repeatedly told him he didn’t spent a single night in Moscow during his November 2013 trip there — a claim that if true, would represent an alibi for a salacious claim in an intelligence dossier about Russia having evidence that Trump engaged in sex acts with Russian sex workers during that trip.

“Those memos were about me and they’re phony memos, Trump said on Fox & Friends. “He didn’t write those memos accurately, he put a lot of phony stuff — for instance, I went to Russia for a day or so, a day or two, because I own the Miss Universe pageant. So, I went there to watch it because it was near Moscow. So I go to Russia. Now, everybody knows — the logs are there, the planes are there — he said, I didn’t stay there a night. Of course I stayed there. I stayed there a very short period of time, but of course I stayed. Well his memo said I left immediately — I never said that. I never said I left immediately.”

The problem for Trump is that the space-time continuum being what it is, it’s not at all clear how Comey would know to make this up in contemporaneous memos written in early 2017. He would have no way to know it would be significant. It simply makes no sense.

Trump was clearly agitated throughout the interview. After his ill-considered comments about Cohen, Fox & Friends hosts quickly steered him to talking about his bromance with Kanye West. But by the end of the interview, the conversation drifted back to Mueller and Trump’s frustrations with the ongoing investigation into himself and his campaign became clear once again.

“You look at the corruption at the top of the FBI — it’s a disgrace,” Trump said. “And our Justice Department, which I try and stay away from, but at some point, I won’t — our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia. There is no collusion with me and Russia, and everybody knows it.