Avenatti coming up on The Beat with Ari Melber

[wasupaloopa]

MSNBC

[samnsara]

1. yesss!!!

[MontanaMama]

2. I hate to say it but

Avenatti is losing a bit of credibility with this lawsuit thing unless he can clear it up pretty quickly.

[wasupaloopa]

3. A judge has placed it on hold because of

Cohen’s problems.

[MontanaMama]

4. Guess that's good

but it’s a distraction. Aside from that, he isn’t telling us anything that we don’t already know. I really hope he gets that mess straightened out and is able to move forward with the kind of offense he had before it came out.

[triron]

5. Are you referring to the LA Times article?

[MontanaMama]

7. Yes.

This one: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-avenatti-bankruptcy-20180522-story.html

Maybe it’s all okay and Avenatti is correct that it’s all a messed up side show. I hope so...but watching him on Ari just now was discouraging because most of the interview was Avenatti sounding defensive. On the heels of John Kelly and Emmit Flood crashing the Justice Dept meeting today, it ll feels like a big fat set back.

[triron]

8. It has nothing to do with the Daniels' case.

[MontanaMama]

10. No it doesn't and it doesn't matter

because it takes away from the Daniels case when he can’t be interviewed without it coming up because it is news. It Avenatti owed the money and didn’t pay it on time, it doesn’t reflect well on him as a person and an attorney. I just hope he cleans it up. Fast.

[MaryMagdaline]

13. He's not our lawyer ... Mueller is

He happens to be someone who's good at fighting in the muck. He's not a knight in shining armor and he does not need to be.

[jberryhill]

15. The Daniels case is stayed until July anyway

While Avenatti filed a motion for reconsideration of the stay today, motions for reconsideration do not have a high rate of success. Originally, he tweeted this when the Daniels case was stayed:

Link to tweet

Since then, he has apparently learned that an appeal of a 90 day stay is kind of silly for the simple reason that the 9th Circuit is not even going to calendar such a thing within 90 days, and there is no basis for an expedited appeal of a run-of-the-mill stay.

So, rather than an "immediate appeal" on April 27, he filed the current motion for reconsideration on May 24.

The motion for reconsideration doesn't directly address the primary reasons for Otero's ruling in the first place, particularly on the factor of prejudice to the plaintiff's interests. While there are all sorts of expansive notions of "what the Daniels case is about", it is an action to nullify an alleged contract and to allow Daniels to speak publicly about having had sex with Donald Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2005. Judge Otero observed, in so many words, that the horses have long left that barn and are on a nationwide cavalry extravaganza, and thus could not find that an additional 90 days of not having Daniels saying she had sex with Donald Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2005 was something of a moot point by now.

But there is utterly nothing about Avenatti's personal business dealings, finances, or anything else, which has any impact, effect, relevance, etc., to Daniels case. It's not as if the US District Court for the Central District of California gives a rat's ass what he, or anyone else, does on television or in the newspapers. The suggestion that it would have any bearing on the court proceeding is, frankly, a sad reflection on general understanding of "how legal stuff works".

[jberryhill]

6. What does that have to do with Daniels' contract case?

[Mr. Ected]

9. jberryhill, as an attorney, what does it mean that the bankruptcy court enforced a judgment?

Does it mean that Avenatti was deemed at a prior hearing to have owed his former partner the sum in question and had yet to pay him as per the order of the court? What enforcement measures exist within the US Bankruptcy Courts? In civil court, a judgment is often levied by the sheriff at the request of the aggrieved creditor, but I didn't know what mechanisms exist with federal court for such matters.

I wonder if the media blitz we've just experienced with Mr. Avenatti wasn't an attempt to increase his marketability and thus increase his potential to repay this debt as ordered by the court.

Mind you, I don't think any of this bears on Mr. Avenatti's character - I'm quite a fan, to be honest - just wondering what really may have happened without all the hyperbole applied by the media to influence our opinions.

[jberryhill]

14. There was a long thread on this already, with links to the relevant documents (and not news reports)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2064803

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10644244

Because more people tend to POST to DU instead of actually reading and discussing things at DU, any single topic tends to get splintered into repetitive threads, and it's not worth posting the same links to direct, non-news-organization, original documents in each of them.

So people will throw out things like "I'm suspicious of the timing" unaware that this dispute has been going on since March 2017, and similar nonsense.

An overall view of the docket leading up to the settlement indicates that in and around February-ish of this year, the parties were proceeding toward a settlement, on the terms that were endorsed by the court in March, which would have been concurrent with the late February / early March time frame that Daniels would have reasonably engaged Avenatti. That timeframe can be deduced from the fact that Avenatti would certainly not have been advising Daniels in January, when she signed the denial after the basic facts of her payment were known anyway, nor would it have been around the (just off the top of my head) mid-February time that Cohen got the arbitration award which was the triggering event for Daniels to seek recission of the contract in the first place.

So, what you are saying may be plausible. Obviously one would not agree to a multi-million dollar settlement with payments due in a few weeks if one did not think one would have the ability to pay on time or one was under the impression they were going to get exceptionally lucky in the near future. As is frequently mentioned, he was on the team that obtained a whopping $454M damage award from Kimberly Clark. Less frequently mentioned is that it was reduced on remittitur to $20M and that remaining amount is on appeal. These are the ordinary travails of contingency fee or partial contingency fee litigation.

As far as enforcement goes - being a judgment debtor is being a judgment debtor. A complicating factor here is the concurrent divorce proceeding in which the estranged Mrs. Avenatti has filed motions to compel production of financial statements from Mr. Avenatti, which are usually produced in the ordinary course of a divorce proceeding.

In any event, his personal financial situation has no bearing on the substance of the contract action between Daniels and Essential Consultants, which is subject to a stay until July anyway. Today, Avenatti filed a motion for reconsideration of the stay, to which the other side has a deadline of June 1 to respond. The court may, or may not, lift the stay, but the reasoning in the motion for consideration, based on a quick read, appears primarily to be premised on "Rudy Giuliani said a bunch of stuff on TV".

[Whiskeytide]

11. Not a thing. I think some here have...

... have anointed Avenetti as some kind of point man on the war against Trump, and when something messy - like a dispute with a past partner - sloshes out of the bucket and stains the hero's white hat, it results in a chorus of "Oh Noes".

[jberryhill]

12. Yeah I don't understand that either

If this bothers people, then the sequence of events in his divorce proceeding (also pending since December) will require fainting couches.