Mm, well, this is all very febrile, isn't it?
A couple of thoughts after looking through those links.
- The statement from Columbus Nova (Viktor Vekselberg-related company which paid $500,000 to Cohen's company), includes the following: "After the inauguration, the firm hired Michael Cohen as a business consultant regarding potential sources of capital and potential investments in real estate and other ventures."
So as we said previously, Sean Hannity's claim that he talked to Cohen about real estate digs Hannity a big ol' hole.
- Echoing everyone else, where the heck did Avenatti get those docs and what the heck is going on?
Avenatti is staging reveals night-by-night, like a film script. His access to just the right documents has a whiff of the true-but-selective material being leaked to eg New York Times before the election to smear Hillary. And he was using the same language as recent Republican attention-seeking dramatics, eg "The American people demand the Dept of Justice release these SARs that are confidential in the first place, and now part of an active investigation. "
Maybe he's just playing the Trumpers at their own game, and doing it well. Looking at his Wikipedia page he has the experience and connections without needing a foreign power as a sugar daddy (unlike Cohen and many talentless Trump appointees).
But I'm going to try not to get too drawn in to the Stormy theatrics – even though the material seems both important and substantive, unlike the speculative FUD of "Hillary! emails!" – and to continue keeping an eye on all the other shit that's going down.
Hard, when there's so much of it...