The Daily - The Rise of Michael Avenatti

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

How did the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels, become a household name and the new face of Democratic opposition to President Trump? Guest: Matthew Shaer, who wrote about Mr. Avenatti for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, how did the lawyer for Stormy Daniels become a household name and the new face of Democratic opposition to Donald Trump? The rise of Michael Avenatti. It's Monday, August 6th. So in March of 2018, the world gets introduced to Michael Avenatti, who is an attorney from Los Angeles and has agreed to

represent Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, in her lawsuit against the president of the United States. Matt Scher recently profiled Avenatti for the Times Magazine. And at that time, she had a very straightforward aim. She wanted to get out of the undisclosure agreement and be able to describe publicly her affair with Trump. There was never any deal because the parties to the deal did not execute the agreement. Your viewers know that if there's a written contract, if everybody doesn't sign it, there's no deal. And in this situation, everybody did not sign the deal. Donald Trump never signed the deal.

The first thing that happens is he files papers trying to get the NDA invalidated, and he immediately embarks on a press tour. And I think, you know, when you talk to him about his decision to go so heavy on the media appearances, he does have a rationale for it. It's not that I like being in front of the camera and the camera likes me. It's that, well, look at the way that she is being depicted in the news. She doesn't have a voice in this. She's not allowed to speak.

People are allowed to talk about her and to disparage her. And Avenatti thought that the best way for her to kind of fight back, for lack of a better term, is to get herself out there and to get her own story out there. For sitting here talking to me today, you could be fined a million dollars. I mean, aren't you taking a big risk? I am. I guess I'm not 100% sure on why you're doing this. Because it was very important to me to be able to defend myself. Is part of talking wanting to set the record straight? 100%. It starts to orchestrate what has now become the very famous 60 Minutes interview between Anderson Cooper and Stormy Daniels, where she does, in fact, describe the alleged affair. How was the conversation? It started off all about him just talking about himself.

And he's like, have you seen my new magazine? He was showing you his own picture on the cover of a magazine. Right. In pretty extraordinary detail. In extraordinary detail. And I was like, someone should take that magazine and spank you with it. And I'll never forget the look on his face. What was the look? Just, I don't think anyone's

ever spoken to him like that. Especially, you know, a young woman who looked like me. And I said, you know, give me that. And I turned to him going, you wouldn't. Hand it over. And so he did. And I was like, turn around, drop him. You told Donald Trump to turn around and take off his pants? Yes. And did he? Yes. So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little. He had underwear on and stuff, and I just gave him a couple swats. And now to the fallout from Stormy Daniel's 60 Minutes interview,

in which she says that she was threatened to keep quiet over her alleged sexual encounter with Donald Trump. It puts the president's personal life under a microscope in a way that, frankly, he has not had to endure since taking office. I think in the weeks after the 60 Minutes interview airs, you see it succeeds in making the Stormy Daniel story one of the major scandals of the Trump administration. And it puts it front and center in a way that it wasn't before.

It makes her hard to ignore. Well, 22 million people watched the Stormy Daniels 60 Minutes interview, making it the most watched episode in 10 years. Now, what's fascinating about this is we think Avenatti is so omnipresent right now, but we're talking, you know, before he came to New York, which is where he does the bulk of his interviews, he had 500 Twitter followers. No one knew who he was on a national scale, but he starts immediately giving big TV interviews and he finds that he's really good on TV. And as he starts to do more TV spots, producers from other networks start reaching out to him because he is able to embody a combativeness

that maybe was missing in some way from the cable news landscape. Let's talk about Michael Cohen, what kind of man this is. This is the kind of guy who claimed, in connection with that story, that there's no such thing as spousal rape. This is a legal genius. Right, right.

Right. Completely false. The guy doesn't even know the law. He's a thug. Right, right. Your friend is a thug. Well, thank you. That's a million dollars.

No, that's three million. A million dollars. Thug. A million dollars. Thug. Thug. Thug. Thug? You are a thug. Anyone who would come on here. Wait a second. Anyone, you see, anyone. Thug.

By the way. He's a thug. And he's able to level the kind of attacks that make for really good television. So he's sort of simultaneously making the Stephanie Clifford story, the Stormy Daniels story, mainstream news. And also just sort of more broadly becoming this kind of anti-Trump figure on cable news. Exactly. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, I know that handsome lawyer.

I've seen a lot of Michael Avenatti on TV. Every time I turn on the TV, there he is. I actually remember that Avenatti was on cable so much that news would break while he was on a set. And he would actually just react to it live on air. Do you want to hear what the president said? Why not? All right, here we go. Take a listen. I think there was one morning where President Trump went on Fox and said something about the case. How much of your legal work was handled by Michael Cohen? Well, as a percentage of my overall legal work, a tiny, tiny little fraction. But Michael would represent me and represent me on some things.

He represents me like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal. He represented me and... And then... Oh, wow. So the president just said that Michael Cohen represented him on the Stormy Daniels case. Another gift from the heavens in this case. They keep coming.

I don't know how I've fallen into such good luck in this case, but I'm going to take it. Joe Scarborough turns to him, I remember this vividly, and says, like, What's the impact of that? It's a hugely damaging admission by the president, because according to what he said on Air Force One a few weeks ago, he didn't know anything about the agreement. He didn't know anything about the payment. It was like, wow, you are on TV a lot. It's, as far as I can tell, unprecedented in terms of the sheer amount of interviews he gave in a relatively short period of time. Again, this is only a few months ago, right, that he came onto the scene and he was giving

upwards of 100 interviews easily in a period of weeks. Michael Avenatti is Stormy Daniels' attorney and joins us now. Sir, good morning. Nice to see you. Good morning with us as well as Michael Avenatti, who, as you know, represents Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels' lawyer is here with me live right now. Michael, thank you for joining us this morning. Good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. No, I don't want you to be nervous if you've never been on TV before. With me now, Story Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti. Great to have you with us tonight, sir. Thanks for having me, Shannon. Really appreciate it.

Warriors don't normally do talk shows. I'm not your normal lawyer, I guess. So how did you come to spend time with Avenatti? So I just finished a very different kind of story. And my editor and I were talking about different profile possibilities. Late last year, I did a profile of Sean Hannity. I was really interested in that world of cable news and the big personalities. And, you know, I'd watched Avenatti pretty regularly. And so one afternoon, it was a Sunday, I think, I emailed him.

He called me back within 10 minutes. He's getting his makeup done at some green room in Los Angeles. And he says, yeah, okay, let's do it. Hangs up. He calls me back like a couple hours later. He's like, actually, can you come to New York tomorrow? I've got some really big news that's going to break. And I think you should be on hand to see it.

And so I did. And what happened? So I get on you should be on hand to see it. And so I did. And what happened? So I get on the plane, get up to New York. This is the night before the revelations that he's promised are about to break. And I spent an afternoon with him at various television studios and basically couldn't contain myself anymore. And I said, can you tell me what, can you give me a hint before it happens tomorrow? And he said, yeah, it has to do with Michael Cohen. So the next day, he says, come back to my hotel room. He's staying at a luxury hotel. What's up?

I'm good, how are you? So I come to his room, and he's already got a camera crew in there from a Showtime series called The Circus, and he's being filmed making this revelation. I mean, what happened was, on Saturday, some information came to us, and we decided that we can't sit on it, we need to break it. And the revelation turns out to be... We have information now that the president's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has been

accepting money from the Russians after the election. Starting in January of 2017, out of the same account that he paid my client out of on October 27th of 2016. What's the money for? We don't know what it's for, but what we do know is that this was the same bank account that was set up for the purpose of paying my client $130,000,

and we find it rather ironic that it appears that the reimbursement of that payment may in fact have come from the Russians. So he has prepared in advance this big dossier. It's six pages in length. And it's crazy. I mean, it allegedly illustrates how these transactions took place. And he puts it on Dropbox, and then he puts the link to the Dropbox file onto Twitter. This is the first tweet. After significant investigation, we have discovered that Mr. Trump's attorney, Mr. Cohen, received approximately $500,000 from a company controlled by a Russian oligarch with close ties to Mr. Putin. These monies may have reimbursed the $130,000 payment. That's a big deal. Okay, let's give him the second tweet now.

The executive summary may be accessed via the link below. Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen have a lot of explaining to do. It was just sent. It was just sent. There it is. There's this weird thing that happens with something this big where there's a little lag, right? Like he puts it up, 10 minutes pass where people are like, holy crap or whatever or pointing to it on Twitter. And then like the real avalanche happens.

It just explodes. This morning, potentially explosive revelations from porn star Stormy Daniels' lawyer. Newly revealed documents appear to link President Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to payments from a Russian oligarch with Kremlin ties. The records show several payments to Essential Consultants, LLC, that attorney Michael Avenatti calls suspicious.

Essential Consultants is the same firm Cohen used to pay Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. Vekselberg was one of several Russian oligarchs sanctioned last month for his close ties to Vladimir Putin. You know, I'm sitting there with him in his hotel room and it's me and him and we're watching on TV and it's just every channel that we turn to is a picture of him. He'd been in front of the camera a lot. He'd done a lot of media appearances. But this was something else. This was something where he was actually driving the news. He was driving the conversation. He was steering it all himself.

And in 2018, think about how hard that is. Think about how hard it is for one person who's not named Donald Trump to say one thing and have it be the center of the world. The amount of adrenaline going through that guy after the news broke was tremendous. I mean, he couldn't sit still. It's interesting. He's kind of doing it Trump style. Send a tweet, take over the whole news cycle. Totally. He bristles a little bit about the Trump comparison, but he has Trump's understanding of how news cycles work and how to manipulate them. He knew exactly how that would play out. You know, Avenatti had initially hoped to do this disclosure earlier in the day,

but then Trump planned a press conference at the White House. And so Avenatti said, I don't want to compete against the pundits talking about what Trump said in the Rose Garden. So what I'm going to do is wait two hours after Trump gives his speech, and then I'm going to push it live, and then I'm going to do Anderson, and then I will have it all to myself. Oh, wow. That really does sound Trumpian, to kind of monitor the news cycle and know when you might have an opening. Yeah. We'll be right back.

Thanks for being so understanding on my schedule, by the way. It's fine. So I'm going to come out for a day, and we can get a coffee in your neighborhood or something. All right. What day do you want to come out? Tuesday or Wednesday. Okay.

Tuesday, maybe. I'm going to check real quick. I'm pretty flexible, actually. It could be later in the week, but then we're going to have to, the pieces are going to have to start coming together by then. So Matt, what do you learn in doing this profile of Mike Lavinati after this sort of crazy start? What was it like hanging out with him as he's emerging as this kind of public opposition figure? Part of what I learned in New York and in Los Angeles, where I eventually went to visit him, is exactly how much of a hero he had become. It was like being around an A-list celebrity.

I'll give you an example. I went out with him. He lives right near Beverly Hills and went out one night with him to dinner. And after dinner, we went to go get a beer nearby. He goes into the bar. He can't get a drink without signing autographs and posing for, I think, four or five sets of selfies,

which he does every time. He says he's never turned down a selfie request. I'm just wondering, Michael, pardon me for interrupting, but would you mind if I took a selfie of you? No, let's do it. I show all my anti-Trump people. Oh, yeah? Here, I'll stand next to you. No, you're doing a great job.

I'll stand next to you. Are you a Trump supporter? No, no, he's got all of his friends on me. All right. That's a good thing. All right, good job. I wish you a lot of success. I know you've got a whole bunch of balls in the air, irons in the fire.

Yep, thank you. It's good to see you. We're going down to Billy's if you're going to goof off the rest of the day. Come on down. We leave the bar, and there is a line of paparazzi out front. In his face, following him down the street. This is something that happened to him in New York when I was with him. He would be in a restaurant and people would come up to him and usually it was some combination of thank you, I love you.

In this process of representing Daniels and of being on TV, he did develop this fan base who saw him as filling a void that hadn't been filled by other people on the left or other Democratic figures. I mean, this is what happens when your entire administration is built on a house of lies. Let's be honest. The whole reason that we're in love with you and Stormy is because we think you guys are the tip of the spear that's going to take down Donald Trump. It's all about that. Now, I know she's just your client, and this is one case for you, but walk me through how our dreams can come true. You know, as he starts to develop enemies on the right, he really gets this solidified reputation as this, it's like a combination pinup boy and crusading liberal. It's some, you know, it's this perfectly 2018 combination of both. Right. You were saying earlier that TV news was missing some combativeness. And my first reaction

to that was, really, is it? But do you mean that it was missing that on the left, that no one existed to go up against the kind of right-wing TV culture of bulldogs until Avenatti? Avenatti on one of these occasions when he was appearing on a bunch of shows. And I was standing in the green room with a former Trump official who shall remain nameless. And we were watching Avenatti go and the official was like, this is the Trump campaign's worst nightmare. This is someone who can suck up the oxygen, who can be loud and brash and throw bombs, but he also knows the law really well and I think has on a number of occasions put Trump's lawyers and specifically Rudy Giuliani on the defensive. The president of the United States,

when he was running, Donald Trump, he promised the American people that he was gonna surround himself with the best and the brightest. We heard that repeatedly. Rudy Giuliani is hardly the best and the brightest. He's an embarrassment. And I can't believe the president of the United States, this is the best he can get to represent his interest.

It's an absolute joke. So before Avenatti agrees to represent Daniels, or right around the time he does agree to represent her, the journal comes forward with this article reporting about the NDA represent Daniels, or right around the time he does agree to represent her, the journal comes forward with this article reporting about the NDA that Daniels signed. Now, initially Trump's reaction is Cohen made the payments. You'll have to ask Cohen about that. Avenatti gets out there and starts pushing, right? He keeps Stormy Daniels front and center. He keeps himself front and center. And when Trump retains Giuliani as his personal attorney, Giuliani makes this series of strange appearances where he is pushed on the allegations that Avenatti is making. Having something to do with paying some Stormy Daniels woman $130,000,

which is going to turn out to be perfectly legal. And he seemingly under the pressure eventually coughs up that Trump did know about the payments to Daniels. That money was not campaign money. Sorry, I'm giving you a fact now that you don't know. It's not campaign money, no campaign finance violation. So they funneled it through the law firm. Funneled through the law firm, and the president repaid it. Oh, I didn't know that he did. There's no campaign finance law. Zero. So by appearing on television as much as he does,

and being so combative, and trying to shape the narrative, Avenatti knows he's going to force the Trump team to try to tell their own version of the story and maybe tell too much of their own version of the story or a version that they should not be telling. And they make it more real. Yeah, I mean, look, Donald Trump's the president, right? He doesn't have to talk about this kind of stuff. His lawyers don't have to talk about this kind of stuff.

And I think there is a sense in which Avenatti has succeeded in drawing them out on that and making them lose control of the narrative. Well, on that note, I'm also struck by the savviness of using TV as the battleground in all of this, rather than the courts, understanding, as Avenatti seems to, the power that television holds for the president and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, because he is all over cable and he seems to be litigating as much

for the court of public opinion as the court itself. You could say that Giuliani is doing an Avenatti impression, right? Avenatti was out there first assailing Trump. Trump's team was pretty uncharacteristically quiet. I mean, Trump has been so quiet about Avenatti, right? I mean, he's tweeted about Daniels. He called her a con job. But, you know, he's been really quiet about Avenatti. But then after Avenatti keeps pushing, then Giuliani comes

out and starts pushing back. Does the president fear Avenatti? Is that what you're suggesting? I think he must. I think he must. I don't know. I've never talked to the president about this. I've never talked to the president, period. But if I was Donald Trump and I employed the media strategy that I did, I would be fearful of someone who is, in effect, using my game, my strategy against me. to me. I can't help but notice that lately, the Daniels case has kind of simmered down. It's not as prominent in the news, but Avenatti is still very much present. If there was a white family from middle America that traveled to another country, even if they traveled there illegally and attempted to enter that country

and had their little girl or little boy taken from them, separated from them and detained like this, this nation, our nation would be outraged. I think in a lot of ways, he's come to enjoy his time in the spotlight and come to see himself as being indispensable to this moment. That he thinks that he, with this platform that he has now, is able to do things that other folks aren't.

A good example, in short, is when this crisis at the border is happening, where families are getting separated. And he says, I'm going to go down there. I'm going to go down there and I'm going to represent some of these families. Now, does Avenatti have any experience in immigration law? No, not necessarily. But does he have an enormous platform to draw attention to what's happening? Yes, absolutely.

And in that sense, that works as well. And he does help to draw attention to it. So I think taking the Daniels case made him who he is now. So I think taking the Daniels case made him who he is now. But we're starting to see like phase two Avenatti, for lack of a better term, which is that he's become a political persona in his own right. And he's encouraged in that sense by feedback, right, which he gets and enjoys. And I think that that is partially what's prompted him recently to start flirting with the idea of running for president himself. Here's what I'll say. A lot of people have approached me and suggested that I run for president. And here's what I know. 2020 is going to prove to be a critical election in our nation's history.

There's a lot at stake in this election, perhaps more so than certainly at any other point in time in the last 50 or 60 years. The Democrats have to nominate somebody that can actually beat Donald Trump. And he started talking on Twitter about what it will take to beat Trump. And his rationale, in short, is that it's going to take a Trump to beat Trump. Those aren't his exact words, but something like that, that it's going to take a street fighter to beat a street fighter. So Avenatti has started to describe the need for a Democratic presidential candidate who happens to sound a lot like him. Exactly.

And he's, you know, he's careful. If you follow his tweets about this, he never says, please elect me president. He just says, we need someone equally combative if we have any hope of beating Trump. We don't need a moderate, we need a fighter. And if you scroll down and read what people say about him, you'll get about 10,000 responses of, please run. We're waiting for you. Matt, thank you very much. Thank you. Later this week, Michael Avenatti is scheduled to travel to Iowa to speak at a Democratic fundraiser known as a frequent stop for potential presidential candidates.

Here's what else you need to know today. In a tweet on Sunday, President Trump acknowledged that the motive behind a 2016 meeting between his campaign aides and a Russian government lawyer was to, quote, get information on an opponent, something the president has previously denied in a statement he helped dictate. previously denied in a statement he helped dictate. That statement, written aboard Air Force One, claimed the meeting was really about U.S. adoption policy, a claim later debunked by emails obtained by the Times. The president's tweet on Sunday was intended to defend his son, Donald Trump Jr., who participated in the original meeting at Trump Tower, which is under investigation by the special counsel. But it served as an admission

that the campaign sought to get damaging intelligence about Hillary Clinton from a Russian national, which may violate federal law. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.