Although I got Anthony Weiner vibes from this guy from the start.

Trump really hates Avanatti. He got some of his mobster friends to lie. I'll just wait and see if anything comes of it. Looks like NO money ever changed hands, so I'm doubtful it's what Trump lovers think it is.

He's a slick con man, and that should have been evident to anyone. It's extremely unfortunate that his interests were aligned with those of the Democratic party for a period of time, because now there's always going to be this guilt by association.

Let Trump go Free Still, while Charging This Instead and this is the SDNY, we think. #ThingsThatMakeOneUmmUmm

Anyone paying attention knew Avenatti was as dirty as they come.

Not related to extortion (I'm sure that will come soon).

for a March 2019 offense. And yet when it comes to charging members of the Trump administration or family, it seems to take years and years.


https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5780145/U-S-v-Michael-Avenatti-Complaint.pdf

As it was here. He was about to carry out his threat against Nike. The charging document isn't an indictment. It's a warrant for his arrest based on probable cause issued by a magistrate.

Comparing this to the Trump investigation is comparing apples to cement mixers.

is probable worse...

Usually they say over and over how they can't comment. Avenatti is no angel but this has TRUMP all over it.

Not a good comparison at all.

Last edited Mon Mar 25, 2019, 02:44 PM - Edit history (1)

attempting to take advantage of left wing disgust for trump for his own benefit. That being said, this is strange indeed. I'm not defending Avenatti (or perhaps I am) but the timing of this is odd.

The timing is real odd. Glad at least someone else is seeing it.

She obviously got his number.

And speaking of Stormy Daniels, does anyone find it strange that she is turning out to be the person with the most integrity in this whole sordid chapter of American history?

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She's always been completely open and honest about who she is, a rarity in this ship of fools.

I'm tempted to make some analogy about which way the wind blows but I'm restraining myself.

Nike seems bad PR proof. Ask Colin.

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Anything can happen in a court case.
Roughly, they're supposed to be 95% confident their indictment will stick.

Chance he beats all three indictments would be roughly .05 x .05 x .05 = 0.0125 % or roughly 1 in 10,000.

and I have not seen them charge him with tax evasion .. yet (unless I missed something).

He's come off his company being evicted for non payment of rent, already fighting bankruptcies and big 7 figure civil bills from his wife (support arrears), business partner and client(s).

His girlfriend didn't get a criminal conviction for assault but she might win a civil case against him (though it might be trying to get blood from a stone ..)

What clients he does have are probably looking for a new lawyer ... Others may be scrambling to get in line for a tiny slice of whatever he has left (he's probably in violation of his legal trust beyond the one client ...).

He's in deep trouble and appears to have been for some time.
His house of cards seems to be tumbling down.
He might wind up as a cell mate of Michael Cohen ....

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He isn't president and he is better looking.

I now wonder if his reasoning for running for president was to use the same technique as trump to save his own sorry ass (edit: before Fort Knox is emptied by trump).

Could be. But, isn't the timing odd?

Read the charging document: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5780145-U-S-v-Michael-Avenatti-Complaint.html

....
According to an affidavit filed with the criminal complaint in this case, Avenatti negotiated a settlement which called for $1.6 million in settlement money to be paid on January 10, 2018, but then gave the client a bogus settlement agreement with a false payment date of March 10, 2018. The affidavit states that Avenatti misappropriated his client’s settlement money and used it to pay expenses for his coffee business, Global Baristas US LLC, which operated Tully’s Coffee stores in California and Washington state, as well as for his own expenses. When the fake March 2018 deadline passed and the client asked where the money was, Avenatti continued to conceal that the payment had already been received, court documents said.

Avenatti also allegedly defrauded a bank in Mississippi by submitting to the lender false tax returns in order to obtain three loans totaling $4.1 million for his law firm and coffee business in 2014. According to the affidavit, Avenatti obtained the loans by submitting fabricated individual income tax returns (Forms 1040) for 2011, 2012, and 2013, reporting substantial income even though he had never filed any such returns with the Internal Revenue Service. The phony returns stated that he earned $4,562,881 in adjusted gross income in 2011, $5,423,099 in 2012, and $4,082,803 in 2013, according to the affidavit. Avenatti allegedly also claimed he paid $1.6 million in estimated tax payments to the IRS in 2012 and paid $1.25 million in 2013. In reality, Avenatti never filed personal income tax returns for 2011, 2012 and 2013 and did not make any estimated tax payments in 2012 and 2013. Instead of the millions of dollars he claimed to have paid in taxes, Avenatti still owed the IRS $850,438 in unpaid personal income tax plus interest and penalties for the tax years 2009 and 2010, court papers state. The affidavit also alleges that, as part of his loan applications, Avenatti also submitted a fictitious partnership tax return for his law firm.

“A lawyer has a basic duty not to steal from his client,” said United States Attorney Nick Hanna. “Mr. Avenatti is facing serious criminal charges alleging he misappropriated client trust funds for his personal use and he defrauded a bank by submitting phony tax returns in order to obtain millions of dollars in loans.”
....
If convicted on both charges, Avenatti will face a statutory maximum sentence of 50 years in federal prison.

But this seems like a shiny object, while Trump still stands. Americans love their distractions.

...the focus is switching to all of the "deeds" of the Trump detractors. Not that I'm a big Avenatti fan, but he was a pretty good foil for the Orange Asshole (Registered Trademark) for awhile. Now, here come the I-told-you-so's from the RW'ers.

This. And another one.

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#basta

If the charge sticks, he can always run as a Republican.

As it stands, I really don't think a pardon is in the works.

Somethings rotten in Denmark!

Another diversion!

If this is all true of course.

He's been a real pain in the ass to DJT, and I appreciate that, but I imagine those days are over for now.
Fortunately, there will be always a new hemorrhoid waiting in the wings to plague him. Conway?

...But, he's got 10 months to figure it out. This is what happens when kids play adult games.

He's supposed to be representing Jussie Smollet!

Crazytown just keeps getting crazier!

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He'd get hired in a minute!

FWIW I stopped listening (much less trusting) that dude a long while ago because something just seemed off... I figured something like this was coming sooner or later.

If the allegations are true. what WAS he thinking?

Started with the Kimberly Clarke verdict.

He could taste his share of a $454 million verdict.

But it got knocked down to $20M....

...and it went on appeal...

...and the money had all been spent.

He's been on a hamster wheel furiously spinning away because he just needed to get his hands on a couple of ten million dollars and he could have fixed everything with Tully's, the IRS, his ex-wife, his ex-partner, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-client...

...just. one. more. fix.

It could be talk show money, or R. Kelly money, or Nike money, or... dang, he got caught.

I have been lazy in keeping up with Avenatti's trials and tribulations.

His big-time career was pretty much over, once he had that altercation with the gf, and his big client Stormy sued him at one point. A shame, because he could have parlayed that national attention from Stormy into a career with big name clients.

This was on a much smaller scale, of course, but the pattern was familiar. He and I worked at the same law firm for a couple of years; it was a largish, general practice firm, rather stuffy, did a lot of commercial litigation. We new associates were paid fairly well for the time and the location, but this guy, "Dave," had big ambitions. He was very smart, but he was also a kind of superficial, smarmy character who liked to talk about money but never seemed to have any (he was always borrowing lunch money and never paying it back); he wanted the big house, the fancy car, and his wife was fond of shopping. He also made a big deal about being a Christian, which was especially annoying. So anyhow, after a couple of years he got a job in the best-known local personal injury firm (and a respectable one, not the sort that advertised on late-night public-access cable), where he could make a lot more money, and faster. In a few more years he was made partner, and a few years after that he was a managing partner.

And then, at some point in the late nineties, the firm discovered that for at least the previous five years he'd been embezzling from his client trust account, which he was able to do because he was a trusted managing partner. He spent the money on things like a fancy house, a luxury vacation condo, alimony payments, a second wife who liked jewelry, and a lakeside cabin. So the firm fired him, did an audit and found that he'd embezzled even more than they'd realized - more than $2 million. They turned him over to the feds, who prosecuted him for mail fraud. He was sentenced to five years, an upward departure from the sentencing guidelines for defrauding vulnerable victims, including a mentally retarded person, an accident victim who had suffered a debilitating stroke, eight minors, the estates of eight dead people, twelve elderly people, two clients who were either HIV-positive or dying of AIDS, and one homeless person. And, of course, he was promptly disbarred (it was the fastest disbarment in the state's history). Just before he was sentenced he went on a last-minute spending spree when he was supposed to be helping the feds find assets with which to repay his clients, so the judge gave him an extra year.

When Dave got out of prison he moved to another state and got a job as a legal assistant with a medical clinic, but got in trouble yet again for holding himself out to be a lawyer and illegally accessing patient records, and getting involved in a complicated kickback scheme. He was ordered back to jail for 30 days and his federal supervised probation was extended for another three years.

He committed suicide in 2009.

Even from when I first knew him I thought he might be tempted to break bad someday, so I wasn't awfully surprised when he was arrested - but the extent of his thievery was kind of surprising. Avenatti is basically the same guy on a much richer scale. Once you steal a little bit to finance your lifestyle and get away with it, maybe you'll do it again and again until you just can't stop doing it.

for some lawyers the temptation to pilfer the trust account can come up when they've been living high on the hog and all of a sudden some money they thought they were going to get (like Avenatti's Kimberly-Clark settlement) or some other expected contingent fees aren't coming through and they don't want to cut back on their lifestyle and they can't cut back on the alimony, so...

To see people who have so much going for them, a bright future. "All that heaven allows," as the saying goes. And then they get greedy or have an addiction to gambling or spending or whatever, and they crash and burn themselves. It's sad, because they did work hard to get to a safe place. And it gets me angry, because he took someone else's place at a firm at one point, someone who deserved the job.

Good story. Sad, but a good warning.

But...sometimes they do get away with it. Woody Allen's movie, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" is sort of about that. Bad people who skate through life never having to atone, while bad things happen to good people.

I"m guessing you haven't. Since it is clear that Avenatti dictated the timing of all of this. He decided when to threaten Nike and he decided when he was going to carry out that threat, forcing the government to get an arrest warrant on a Sunday to be able to stop him.

There is one person who brought this on Avenatti -- and its Avenatti.

and it's finally catching up with him. SDNY has more than 200 lawyers and they don't coordinate their prosecutions for political effect.

Avenatti is the one that created the timing and, in particular, the deadline for when he was going to carry out his threat.

So in your opinion was he working with Trump to ensure he got arrested at just the right time for Trump? That's an interesting theory. And by interesting, I mean absurd.

Withheld settlement money from a paraplegic.

I know some were taken with him because he took on Trump but sometimes your enemy's enemy is NOT your friend, he just a sleaze.

Nike is very likely guilty of paying top high school players to wear their products in this highly competitive market. These are the kids who are only going to go to college because of the NBA's rule that players must be 18 or older to be drafted. They are the "one and done" kids, the very best of the best. AAU basketball also has a reputation of shadiness, at least here in western Pennsylvania. It would not surprise me at all that all the shoe and apparel companies are funneling money to the top AAU players via their coaches or to the coaches directly to ensure the kids only wear that company's products.

Avenatti has caused problems for Trump. He is a big reason Trump is now an unindicted co-conspirator (Individual 1) in the Cohen hush money payment scheme. He is the one who got and released the FINCEN suspicious financial transactions about the payments. He was one of the first to punch back hard at Trump and opened the door for others to do likewise.

Geoff Berman is the Trump-appointed US Atty in charge of SDNY. Berman even agreed to be interviewed by Trump before he got the job. Berman may not have promised Trump anything, but he'd have to be pretty dumb not to understand the kind of loyalty to Trump, Trump expects from "his people". Berman had to recuse himself in the Cohen investigation and since he's had many dealings with Deutchebank will need to recuse himself from any SDNY investigation/prosecution involving Trump and them. But Berman does not need to recuse himself from leading an investigation of one of Trump's more public and aggressive enemies. I expect this case kind of fell into Berman's lap, but it's a great way for him to show his loyalty to Trump by prosecuting Avenatti to the max and making a public spectacle out of it.

The one in which Avenatti screwed over a client for his own personal gain? Something I suspect he has made a habit of doing.

Some of us recognized that Avenatti was a self-promoting, corrupt narcissist early on. (Maybe that's why he went after Trump -- takes one to know one and all that). And some apparently will view him through rose colored glasses no matter what.

By the way, if you're concerned about Nike's practices (which you should be), shouldn't you also be a bit concerned that Avenatti was offering to cover them up (including setting up a sham internal investigation) if only Nike would pay him $20+ million?

Wow, that's shocking and hilarious at the same time.

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He will have counsel shortly based on what I saw.