Usually the concept of Throwback Thursday should reach back farther than merely months ago, but I can’t resist given yesterday’s news.
So, I throw you back to this February 15, 2018 post. And I do so to point out something about which I was right and something about which I was quite wrong but with a twist.
At the end of that post, I wrote this:
Instead, I want to point out my own opinion, given the way a certain someone is known to operate, about how this likely went down:
Cohen is likely telling the truth about paying with funds of his for which no one reimbursed him, but omitting the most salient detail. He probably wasn’t “reimbursed” by anyone after making the payment because he was probably provided those funds, pretty much immediately in advance of the transaction, as some sort of bonus or even a “gift” with the tacit understanding about what he was expected to do with those funds — purchase Ms. Daniels’s silence.
This was me sort of making things too complicated when I should have stuck with simple. And, yet, I wasn’t too far off the mark.
Earlier in the post, I wrote this:
(c) It also is quite likely that Cohen’s version of the events is probably not 100% the truth, key details have been omitted, and it could very well, if nothing else, be a violation of a rule such as RPC 8.4(c).
That bit, at least if you are now willing to believe another lawyer for the same client over the earlier lawyer for the same client and the client himself now explaining in a series of tweets clearly written by another lawyer – though one who either can’t spell “role” or who knows enough to know his client can’t spell “role,” was pretty much spot on. You can read a pretty decent, condensed version of the roller coaster events of that last 12-18 hours – including links to a deeper dive, in this The ABA Journal piece.
The fact that we now know more about this situation because the latest in a parade of what may go down in history as the worst high-profile legal team ever assembled blurted out this latest on cable news leads me to my segue.
For many reasons, Jeffrey Tambor ought to play the 45th President when the movie of this unprecedented period of American history is filmed.
And, on that note, and in news entirely unrelated to legal ethics but about which I’m even more excited and nerdy than I am about legal ethics generally, tomorrow, on Cinco de Cuatro, the creator of Arrested Development is releasing an entirely re-cut and transformed version of the 4th season of this incredible show. If you’re interested [Ron Howard voice: they were not interested], you can read all about that development here.