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Trump Pays Porn Stars Hush Money

BiffTannen said:
Yeah, so ? Everyone already knows he paid her off. Trumpites don't care.
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You might be right.

But A.) a recording of someone actually doing a bad deed is always worse than a second hand story B.) what are the odds that these two buffoons only talked in a professional manner and didn't say anything else that's unbecoming or illegal? (Hint: incredibly low) and C.) im no lawyer but a recording confirming illegal activity sounds like pretty strong evidence in court
 
Two questions for the lawyers:

Does lawyer-client privilege attach if what they are doing is illegal? This could be a campaign finance violation.

Does a lawyer have the right to tape a call with a client if the discussion is about an illegal act? Can it be used as evidence?
 
i would think it would be subject to the privilege. There are all sorts of exceptions and qualifiers and "it depends" statements to be made here, but my initial reaction is that such a conversation would be privileged.

It's not black and white because Cohen's relationship with Trump is pretty unusual in the lawyering context. One of the salient issues would be whether Cohen was actually acting as a lawyer giving legal advice, or was acting as a corporate executive of the Trump organization discussing business with Trump. That's one of the issues all in-house counsels face and published stories indicate that Cohen may have done little lawyering and much "fixing" of business deals during his time in the organization. It's not clear whether this conversation took place when he was in house or after he left to set up his own one-client law firm.
 
What about the fact that what they were discussing was to conspire to break a law?
 
RJKarl said:
Two questions for the lawyers:

Does lawyer-client privilege attach if what they are doing is illegal? This could be a campaign finance violation.

Does a lawyer have the right to tape a call with a client if the discussion is about an illegal act? Can it be used as evidence?
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There is a crime-fraud exception to privilege. If the lawyer's advice is given in the context of planning a crime or fraud, there is no privilege. Whether this qualifies as a crime, I'm not sure but there will be arguments on both sides. However, that argument was likely already had given that the tape has been released and was not withheld on a privilege basis by the court when it reviewed the confiscated files.
 
it's not clear from the reporting so far that a judge has ruled on it. Seems that this is a leak from the FBI confirmed by Giuliani. Seems like legal genius Giuliani thinks it helps Trump and so is not really asserting the privilege.
 
Deacon923 said:
it's not clear from the reporting so far that a judge has ruled on it. Seems that this is a leak from the FBI confirmed by Giuliani. Seems like legal genius Giuliani thinks it helps Trump and so is not really asserting the privilege.
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It's doubtful this would have been leaked if the Court had ruled it was privileged. You don't alienate the Judge presiding over the matter like that. You risk torpedoing everything.
 
Legally, what’s wrong with paying someone to keep quiet if no crime is involved?
 
Setting aside the crime-fraud exception, arguably, Giuliani broke the privilege by discussing the contents of the tape with the NY Times. I don't know nearly enough about this area of the law to know how much credence should be given to that argument, but it sounds like it might have some legs to me.
 
bym051d said:
Legally, what’s wrong with paying someone to keep quiet if no crime is involved?
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She didn't think she's was being paid off. She thought NE was going to sell her story and benefit her other business deals. Her purpose in taking the payment was to tell her story not keep quiet.

Secondly, if the deal was set up to keep a bad story about Trump from being told, it would have been a campaign expense and wasn't reported as such.
 
I bet he goes:

"Just pay that slut out of the campaign money and make it go away, Jew boy!"

or some such
 
Wouldn't surprise me if it's the paying the hooker off with campaign funds that gets him. Seems way easier to prove than russian collusion, and hadn't someone already traced the $130k in funds split up amongst 4 payments?
 
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