Stormy Daniels

His fans are relieved. He’s getting off scot-free. I’m referring of course to Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor whose charges were dropped today in Chicago. It’s a good week if you’re in the crosshairs of the law — unless, of course, you’re Michael Avenatti, the quondam lawyer for Stormy Daniels who got busted, if that’s the appropriate word, for trying to shake down Nike for a cool $25 million. In Greek, Nike means ‘victory’ but Avenatti looks to be going down to a nasty defeat. The slick talking lawyer had delusions of grandeur all along, reckoning first that he could bring down Trump with a lawsuit, then viewing himself as presidential timber. He’s the one that got felled by law enforcement.

Remember the Cretan liar paradox? Epimenides the Cretan says ‘All Cretans are liars.’ But if it is true that all Cretans are liars, then his statement must be false. But if it is false, then Epimenides is telling the truth. So, Epimenides is both truthful and a liar. Ouch. There are solutions to this paradox—for example, to say that ‘all Cretans are liars’ does not entail that they all lie all the time — but what are we to make of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, emphasis on the word ‘former’? Cohen is being measured for his orange jumpsuit in preparation for his sojourn in the Big House as a guest of the government. His tort? Lying to Congress.

‘Totally clears the President. Thank you!,’ Donald Trump tweeted, following the Southern District of New York’s sentencing filings for Michael Cohen, which recommended prison time for the lawyer. And Donald Trump isn’t mentioned by name in the 40-page document – but things aren’t shaping up too well for whoever ‘Individual-1’ is. Per the filing: ‘During the campaign, Cohen played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories – each from women who claimed to have had an affair with Individual-1 – so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election...

It’s beginning to look as though Michelle Obama does not like Donald Trump. In her new memoir, Becoming, she explains why. Her beef with Trump centers on his embrace of the birther controversy about her husband, who was supposedly born in Indonesia or some other far off country — anywhere but America: ‘The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.

Poor Paul Manafort. His defense attorney Kevin Downing asked if he could appear in his street clothing rather than a dark-green prison jumpsuit for his sentencing on Friday. Manafort, who has spent millions on bespoke suits, has always placed a premium on his public appearance. Judge T.S. Ellis III, however, was having none of it: ‘This defendant should be treated no differently from other defendants who are in custody post conviction.’Another former Donald Trump associate also got kicked in the shins this week, but the source wasn’t a federal judge. Instead, it was Trump who delivered the blow, dismissing his old chum and confederate Michael Cohen as a nobody.

Just when you think it’s all Brett Kavanaugh, all the time, up pops Stormy Daniels as a reminder that Donald Trump faces multiple perils that he can’t simply wave away with a magic wand. Today, it’s a story in the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that is sometimes supposed by Trump’s detractors to be in the hip pocket of the president, but that is actually proving quite nettlesome to him. It reveals that Donald Trump has — surprise! — been much more enmeshed in trying to squash the Daniels story than he has acknowledged. Recall that when quizzed about whether he knew the payment to Daniels on April 5 on Air Force One, Trump responded with a flat ‘no.’ That turned out to not be true.

This week in Washington, the big political stories centered on sex — one with an unfortunate lack of specificity, the other offering all too many details. After days of rumours that Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s pick for the open Supreme Court seat, was facing an allegation somehow related to sexual assault, his accuser came forward and told her story to the Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford shed her anonymity and said Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they were high school students. She remembered how the event occurred, she said, but not exactly when or where. These details are important, but it seems we’ll never know what exactly happened at a suburban Washington house party sometime in the summer of 1982.

Donald Trump is not an overly bookish kind of guy, but he keeps getting slammed by ambitious authors, ranging from Michael Wolff to Bob Woodward. The latest entrant in this crowded field is Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels, a ribald tell-all of her frolics with Trump. In it, she lodges the accusation that she enjoyed the ‘least impressive sex I ever had’ with him. Daniels’s book suggests, among other things, that Sen. Marco Rubio was onto something when he mocked Trump for his small hands. Daniels corroborates Rubio’s suspicions with what the New York Post calls a below-the belt blow.

“A storm’s a coming, baby” the adult film star Stormy Daniels promised during her Saturday Night Live appearance back in May. Judging by the tumult of the months since, she’s made good on her claim – though hardly in the way she envisioned. First, she found herself in handcuffs after Ohio police arrested her and two other women for breaching the state’s ‘no touching’ law. Charges have since been dropped. Then Glendon Crain, her husband and a fellow porn industry veteran who performs under the name Brendan Miller, is filing for divorce, a temporary restraining order, and sole custody of their daughter.