This time the makeup artist had an adorable baby in tow. The baby watched, solemnly, as her mother tried to make me presentable with all the art and craft available to her.
Then, two minutes to air, the producer says into my ear "oh hey, by the way, Michael Avenatti just tweeted something you may want to look at that we'll ask about."
It's hard to offer good analysis with that little time to read the materials and think about them. One point I missed that I would have made given more time to reflect: it's important to remember that Special Counsel Robert Mueller spun off the Cohen investigation to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He presumably did that because the Cohen investigation was not within his brief — that is, not about Russian interference in the 2016 election or directly arising from that. That fact is inconsistent with Michael Avenatti's suggestion that the $500,000 payment from Columbus Nova to Michael Cohen's LLC represents part of the Russian "collusion" that the Special Counsel is investigating. If Mueller thought that, he likely would have kept that part of the investigation under his own control rather than handing it off to SDNY. Federal prosecutors — particularly methodical ones like Mueller — tend to be control freaks. If an investigation (especially one with big showy risky moves like the search of an attorney's office) is going to yield evidence key to their case, they want to be controlling it. But it's early days, and the urge to speculate doesn't lead reliably to truth.
Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2018/05/09/talking-about-the-avenatti-dossier-on-the-beat-on-msnbc/
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