One thing that has jumped out to me about the Daniels story is that she seems to have much better representation now than she did in October 2016. Back then her lawyer was Keith M. Davidson, a lawyer who apparently came her way through her then-manager, Gina Rodriguez. I had read earlier that he was a go-to lawyer for Rodriguez who is known for repping people who come to fame through scandals of various sorts. When I read the agreement, I couldn’t help but note that it reads as almost comically adverse to Daniels and for what in the context seemed like a relatively small sum of money.

My assumption was she had a low rent lawyer who either wasn’t that good or didn’t care. But then I noticed something this evening. In the final days of the 2016 campaign, The Wall Street Journal published a story about Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate who claimed she had an affair with Trump and sold her story to The National Enquirer for $150,000. But the story never ran. They treated it as a ‘catch and kill’ story, buying it up to cover it up. So who represented McDougal? Keith M. Davidson. Read More

“You’re not here to advocate, you’re not here to trash the advocate, you’re not here to argue with me.”

That was Judge Julie Robinson just now, upbraiding Kobach witness Jesse Richman, for interrupting her and the ACLU’s lawyer, Tierney Sneed reports.

Richman is the “expert” whose study of non-citizen voting was cited by the White House to support Trump’s false claim that he would have won the popular vote if it weren’t for millions of illegal votes.

We just finished recording this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast. We had a special guest, Joan Walsh. We talked about the Stormy Daniels’ story among other topics, including the 2016 election. But I wanted to flag one point we discussed in this episode that I’ve learned over recent days. What Daniels told 60 Minutes is more damaging than people may realize. Read More

A truly epic week on the voting rights front.

TPM Prime subscribers can catch up here.

It sounds like voter fraud huckster Hans von Spakovsky’s claims about rampant illegal voting were given the thorough debunking they deserve by the ACLU’s Dale Ho during the trial over Kansas’s proof of citizenship law Friday.

Tierney Sneed reports:

Ho moved on from the report itself to claims that von Spakovsky — and Kobach — have made in op-eds, that Somali nationals voting illegally tipped a state legislative race in Missouri.

A state court ruling found that there was no fraud in the race.

Von Spakovsky said he “was not aware of that” when he wrote his op-ed. Asked if he attempted to retract the claim, von Spakovsky said he didn’t recall when he found out.

That’s kind of how it went.

We have another nugget of news on the Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels front. Cohen says he got the money to pay Daniels from a home equity line of credit. “The funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank,” he told ABC News. Fair enough. I have no reason to reject that claim. But this raises a key point about Michael Cohen. He’s just Trump’s lawyer. He may make a good salary. But he’s not a plutocrat himself who has six figure sums he can toss out like you or I might spend a hundred bucks. But as we’ve discussed before with Michael Cohen, that’s not really true. He appears to be a very, very wealthy man. Read More

So last September, a reporter asked Hans von Spakovsky — one of the leaders of the conservative push to hype voter fraud — whether he was the sender of an email that said putting Democrats or mainstream Republicans on Trump’s voter fraud commission would lead to its “abject failure.”

Von Spakoskvy denied it. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Hours later, it was revealed that von Spakovsky had indeed sent the email. He later claimed, implausibly, that he was confused because the reporter had phrased her question imprecisely.

And now, Tierney Sneed reports, the whole embarrassing episode is being entered into evidence to impeach von Spakovsky’s credibility as a witness in the trial over Kansas’s strict voter registration law. Including the transcript of the reporter’s audio recording, in which von Spakovsky falsely denies sending the email.

I don’t think we know that Sarah Sanders either knew what she was talking about in the just concluded press briefing or whether, if she did, what she said will remain operative through the day or the week. But the upshot of Sanders briefing this afternoon was to walk back dramatically the announcement last night that President Trump would meet with Kim Jong Un. Read More

To say a lot happened on the Russia front this week would be something of an understatement. Here’s our weekly Sum-Up of critical developments on the Trump-Russia investigation.

I wanted to briefly comment and share some perspective on yesterday’s announcement of a Kim-Trump summit this spring. I’m going to format them as a series of propositions or individual items rather than a structured argument. Read More