Discussion: Sekulow Offers Narrow Denial Of Cohen's Claim He Edited Testimony

LOTTA wiggle room in there… Lawyers pass it to Jared or Jr. who does the edits, then passes back through them, not covered… Any other edits the lawyers did do, not covered…

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Jay Sekulow is the Rudy Giuliani of Alan Dershowitzes.

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Yep, that’s a narrow denial, alright. Now prove it. ‘Cause I’m guessing there’s a markup somewhere.

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Is “narrow” the right word to describe this denial? And it seems to me that if Cohen was telling the truth about this, Sekulow’s only recourse if he’s to save his professional skin is to lie and hope there’s no documentation of the truth anywhere. Because at this point it’s not Cohen who’s got more to lose by telling the truth than by lying.

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Yes. It only covers that the lawyers didn’t edit the Trump Tower date. So other parties could have.

And the lawyers could have edited every other word in the paper except the date, and this statement would be objectively true…

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Yeah, saw your first comment and hit the “like” button. Guessing that isn’t narrow enough if he was aware of that particular “edit” before the statement was finalized, but IAdefinitelyNAL.

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Sweeeet —

I was going to google up some watergate stuff …

just so’s I could really see what ’ lawyer dancing ’ looked like …

but now I don’t have to —

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If Cohen has an initial draft (and odds are he saved one, lawyers do that with legal drafts), then there is something to compare to. Odds are Mueller has the draft now, which means he knows how it was changed, and he has Cohen’s testimony about what happened…corroborating what happened should be straightforward. Then, it becomes a matter of determining who exactly made the changes, at which point all bets are off…if the lawyers made the changes their careers are over, and if they didn’t then they will roll on whoever did.

This does all depend on a draft existing somewhere, and it being subpoenaed or provided. Look for that to come up at some future point, it’s pretty important.

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If Cohen didn’t retain a copy of the original draft, then he’s an even worse lawyer than I’ve thought. Which doesn’t seem possible.

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It’s also possible, given a very narrow interpretation of Sekulow’s words, that they told Cohen what the message of the text should be, and he did the actual edits. Many’s the time someone up the chain from me simply made a notation like “unclear” or “how about X” or “Fix this to reflect Y” but never actually put in new text or altered the old. (Yeah, they were called “editors” and I was the writer. Funny, that.)

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“Today’s testimony by Michael Cohen that attorneys for the President edited or changed his statement to Congress to alter the duration of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations is completely false.”

“Attorneys for the President”. Now, can a lawyer employed privately by the man sitting in the Offal Office offer legal advice to that man without being the attorney for the President? Semantics. I would think that an attorney for the President would be acting on behalf of the President, where the President is acting in his official capacity. Can a lawyer employed privately by the man sitting in the Offal Office offer legal advice to or legal maneuvering for that man while the President is not acting in his official capacity?

Almost a worthless question with respect to the obvious: Trump is guilty of multiple crimes.

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He’s also the Jimmy Swaggart of Pat Robertsons.

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Moreover, if only a single attorney, rather than “attorneys,” for the President edited Cohen’s statement, then one could argue that Sekulow’s statement were true.

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Also, the lawyers could have told Cohen to change things, rather than literally changing them themselves.

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I knew Alan Dershowitz. I served with Alan Dershowitz. Alan Dershowitz was a friend of mine (excuse me while I hurl!). You, Mr. Sekulow, are no Alan Dershowitz.

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Hey, if you see Alan, can you ask him to score some insulin for me? I’ve got someone with a lot of money I want to get rid of.

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The difference between Giuliani, Dershowitz and Sekulow (that sounds like the worst law firm in history) is that Sekulow actually practices and most likely really wants remain on the bar.

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Does he, though? I ain’t gonna look it up, because it is against my religion to look stuff up that I am pretty sure about, and it helps me keep my aging memory cells. But Jay Sekulow being hired by Trump is more recent than, say the seizure of the USS Pueblo by North Korea, which I remember pretty well. And when Sekulow was hired, his prior area of practice, if my memory cells are firing on all pistons, was GOP aligned religious freedom advocacy, which means imposition of mostly Southern (segregationist) and Mid Western variants of Protestantism on the rest of us as a guise for GOP political agenda things. I don’t believe Sekulow has a back ground in criminal, real estate or any other real world law fields. There was a Trump real estate attorney who they tried to get put into the WH but that real estate guy ended up having to back off after talking smack out of turn about criminal law.

Am I wrong?

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Didn’t Cohen say the lawyers ‘reviewed’ it? I didn’t see the words ‘edit’, etc.

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