One down

Thus allowing him to avoid deposition.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

This should be fun

A Manhattan judge has cleared the way for President Donald Trump to be deposed in a defamation lawsuit filed by a former "Apprentice" contestant who has accused Trump of sexual assault.

[...]

Associate Justice Dianne Renwick, who sits on the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, denied Trump's effort to dismiss or delay the case, but agreed to fast-track a Trump motion to appeal a March decision that allowed the case to go forward.

[...]

The former contestant, Summer Zervos, has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 2007. She claims Trump kissed her twice on the lips during a lunch meeting in his New York City office, and on a separate occasion in Beverly Hills, she alleges he kissed her aggressively and touched her breast.

Trump has denied the allegations.

  CNN

I assume she'll bring that Hollywood Access tape to court with her.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 11/13/21:

More bad news for His Lardship

This is the Summer Zervos case.  She's the woman who is suing Trump for defamation.

More reason to pack the courts.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The cracks widen

This week, in a remarkable series of bipartisan rebukes to the president, Congress pushed back.

On Wednesday, with seven Republicans breaking ranks, the Senate joined the Democrat-led House in voting to end American military aid to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen in protest over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post. On Thursday morning, the House voted unanimously on a nonbinding resolution to make public the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

And on Thursday afternoon, 12 Republican senators abandoned the president to pass legislation, already adopted by the House, that would block Mr. Trump from declaring a national emergency to build his border wall — an act of defiance that he has vowed to overturn with the first veto of his presidency.

  NYT

Some may be wobbly, not having used their spines for two years.

“We’re saying today, ‘No, we do not acquiesce to this,’” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said after voting to block the emergency declaration. “We do not agree that the president should be able to come in and go against the express intention of the Congress when it comes to these appropriated funds” for his wall.

Anybody want to guess what his nickname for Lisa will be?

“We have an issue that has been litigated and adjudicated through Congress. I mean, what was more litigated than this very question? We had a government shutdown for crying out loud,” said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, referring to funding for the border wall, which Mr. Trump is trying to secure with an emergency declaration that would circumvent Congress.

“It’s about separation of powers,” Mr. Toomey said. “It’s about respecting the principles of the Constitution.”

Nasty nickname for Toomey?

“We don’t often have great votes about great questions around here about separation of powers,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, adding, “I don’t think you can overstate how important it is that for the first time in the history of the country, the full Congress voted to tell the president that we can’t be in a war.”

For Rand?

“He feels good,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a close ally of Mr. Trump who talked to the president shortly after the vote. “He said, ‘My veto will be sustained?’ I said, ‘Yeah, overwhelmingly.’ He feels like his commitment to build the wall is moving forward.”

Smarmy Lindsey is really an asskisser. I wish his compatriots would prove him wrong. But how telling it is that Trump needed reassurance before he'd actually veto the bill.

[T]he rare coalition of Democrats and Republicans could bolster legal challenges to the emergency declaration that could tie up wall funding indefinitely.

And it's highly unlikely that "he feels good." No matter what Lindsey says. He has to be feeling nervous about losing the grip he had on them.  Three times in one week.  While Manafort and Stone and Cohen are in the headlines for crimes in conjunction with the Trump campaign.  And New York's AG opening up an investigation into the Trump organization.  And increased scrutiny on Jared.  Getting closer to the moment when Junior gets indicted. Whitaker called back in to testify.  The noose is tightening.

“There are moments where you see a partisan rebuke” of the president by Congress, said William G. Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action.” “They are really pretty infrequent, and when you do observe them it speaks to real tumult in the party.”

[...]

House Republicans, who joined Democrats in voting to call for Mr. Mueller’s report to be made public, insist there was no tumult.

[...]

[T]he fight over wall funding may incite yet another round of congressional muscle-flexing. A number of Republicans are pushing legislation to claw back the powers that Congress gave the president in the National Emergencies Act, which Mr. Trump invoked to declare an emergency along the southwestern border.

“The Senate’s waking up a little bit to our responsibilities,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.

It's about fucking time. And I'll still remain skeptical until I see it happening some more.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Another blow.



This is the Summer Zervos case.  She's the woman who is suing Trump for defamation.

And in other Trump lawsuits today...

It was a hard day to be newsworthy.

On a consequential day in the presidency of Donald Trump, including news that his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty of bank and tax fraud and his former personal attorney Michael Cohen pled guilty to violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to women, Apprentice season five contestant Summer Zervos has told a New York judge that Trump is refusing to produce documents or information concerning his sexual conduct towards women.

[...]

Right around the exact moment that Cohen appeared in federal court and said he paid women hush money at Trump's direction, Zervos was submitting her own bid for more information in state court.

[...]

Zervos sued Trump in January 2017 just days before Trump took his oath of office. She alleges that Trump defamed her during the 2016 presidential campaign by denying her accusations of a decade-old sexual assault with a tweet how it was "100% fabricated and made-up." On Tuesday, Zervos' attorneys asked a New York state judge to order Trump to comply with discovery requests.

[...]

"The discovery Ms. Zervos seeks concerning other women who have reported Defendant’s illicit sexual conduct is discoverable for several reasons," writes Zervos attorney Mariann Wang in court papers. "It is relevant to rebutting Defendant’s defense that the defamatory statements were substantially true as a whole. It is relevant to Defendant’s pattern of behavior with respect to luring women under false pretenses and intentionally subjecting them to sudden sexual contact. It is relevant to proving both that Defendant made his defamatory statements with common-law malice, such that Plaintiff is entitled to punitive damages, and that Defendant acted with actual malice, which Defendant contends (incorrectly; but that is for the Court to decide later) is necessary for there to be liability. And it is relevant to Defendant’s credibility."

  Hollywood Reporter

He has none.

Trump looked to head off the legal battle by pointing to the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and arguing he was immunized from being sued in state court while in office. At a hearing, Zervos' attorney pointed to Clinton v. Jones, where the Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that a sitting president can't escape private litigation, and promised to accommodate him. "We can certainly ensure that we take a deposition down at Mar-a-Lago in between his playing golf," said Wang.

In March, New York Supreme Court Judge Jennifer Schecter allowed the lawsuit to proceed and refused to stop discovery. "No one is above the law," she wrote.

Marc Kasowitz, attorney for Trump, attempted to get a New York appeals court to intervene, but those efforts were rebuffed, leading to the first round of the discovery fight.

[...]

Trump's lawyer will be filing responsive papers next month.

Trump's lawyer is going to be a very, very busy boy.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump's affairs

Not that any of this will save us.

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles [...] with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal. [...] Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me - telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you - I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s.

[...]

Afterward, McDougal wrote, she “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was a lot).” Trump, she said, always stayed in the same bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordered the same meal—steak and mashed potatoes—and never drank. McDougal’s account is consistent with other descriptions of Trump’s behavior.

[...]

McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.

  New Yorker

I don't see that. Where's the complex legal agreement? No payoff happened. She assumed he was trying to pay her for services rendered. That seems like a fair assumption.

There must be more.

On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story, which it never ran. Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call “catch and kill.” This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as “a personal friend.”

Okay, now we're into shady territory.

McDougal, in her first on-the-record comments about A.M.I.’s handling of her story, declined to discuss the details of her relationship with Trump, for fear of violating the agreement she reached with the company. She did say, however, that she regretted signing the contract. “It took my rights away,” McDougal told me. “At this point I feel I can’t talk about anything without getting into trouble, because I don’t know what I’m allowed to talk about. I’m afraid to even mention his name.”

[...]

A.M.I. said that an amendment to McDougal’s contract—signed after Trump won the election—allowed her to “respond to legitimate press inquiries” regarding the affair. The company said that it did not print the story because it did not find it credible.

[...]

Six former A.M.I. employees told me that Pecker routinely makes catch-and-kill arrangements like the one reached with McDougal. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” Jerry George, a former A.M.I. senior editor who worked at the company for more than twenty-five years, told me. George said that Pecker protected Trump. “Pecker really considered him a friend,” George told me. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval.” [...] “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power—he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.”

[...]

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” alleged that Trump assaulted her at a private dinner meeting, in December of 2007, at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Trump, Zervos has claimed, kissed her, groped her breast, and suggested that they lie down to “watch some telly-telly.” After Zervos rebuffed Trump’s advances, she said that he “began thrusting his genitals” against her. (Zervos recently sued Trump for defamation after he denied her account.)

[...]

All three women [inclding Stormy Daniels] say that they were escorted to a bungalow at the hotel by a Trump bodyguard, whom two of the women have identified as Keith Schiller.

The guy who says he saw Trump to his Moscow hotel room where the pee tape was allegedly made and then left, so doesn't know whether prostitutes came up. Right.

Over the course of the affair, Trump flew McDougal to public events across the country but hid the fact that he paid for her travel. “No paper trails for him,” she wrote. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.”

According to the report, he was having an affair with Daniels and McDougal at the same time. His base will only be jealous.

McDougal’s account, like those of Clifford and other women who have described Trump’s advances, conveys a man preoccupied with his image. McDougal recalled that Trump would often send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and sun visors from his golf courses. Clifford recalled Trump remarking that she and Ivanka were similar and proudly showing her a copy of a “money magazine” with his image on the cover.

Having her spank him with it, as I recall.

Trump also promised to buy McDougal an apartment in New York as a Christmas present. Clifford, likewise, said that Trump promised to buy her a condo in Tampa.

I think Clifford said she knew it was a bogus promise.

McDougal ended the relationship in April, 2007, after nine months. [...] The decision was reinforced by a series of comments Trump made that McDougal found disrespectful, according to several of her friends. When she raised her concern about her mother’s disapproval to Trump, he replied, “What, that old hag?” (McDougal, hurt, pointed out that Trump and her mother were close in age.) On the night of the Miss Universe pageant McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black dick” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size.

What a guy.

And he's not the only one. Her "friend" and two others who were involved in getting her the $150,000 payment for her story (which AMI buried), each took a cut, leaving her with an actual payment of $82,500. One of those was the same guy - attorney Keith Davidson - who negotiated the NDA between Daniels and Trump's lawyer for $130,000. I wonder how much of that he took.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.