Trump's life-long and systematic NDA-terrorism has finally been laughed out of court. And that's anything but a laughing matter for the orange bully and the attorneys working to keep his lard ass out of prison. I bet he's sorry he every tangled with Omarosa! This morning Roger Sollenberg and Asawin Suebsaeng wrote that the floodgates may have finally opened. This isn't just going to be campaign-centric-- his supporters just do not care what he's done-- but about prosecutable criminality. For one thing, we can all expect the fireworks between Trump and the select committee investigating the coup attempt to begin immediately. "One tripwire," reported Kyle Cheney this morning, "will come Thursday, when subpoenas to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino and Trump-world figures Steve Bannon and Kash Patel require them to supply documents to the panel. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said Friday that he was prepared to issue 'criminal referrals' to anyone who defied deadlines... [C]ommittee members expect that these witnesses won’t willingly cooperate-- one of the reasons the panel issued subpoenas without offering them a chance to voluntarily provide documents or testimony... The deadline for Trump to ask President Joe Biden to shield his records from the committee is expected to arrive midweek, though the exact timing has been shrouded in secrecy. Trump has insisted he would attempt to block the records from release, a move that could trigger a complex and uncharted legal battle over the limits of executive privilege claims by former presidents. Biden’s White House has indicated it will look favorably on the committee’s requests for documents but stopped short of a blanket promise to release everything that Trump seeks to withhold."
Señor Trumpanzee, has used non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, they wrote, "to prevent staff and associates from divulging information about his political and corporate empires. But a recent court judgment has called into question just how iron-clad these agreements really are, potentially exposing Trump to many of the secrets he’s worked to keep private in all facets of his life."
A ruling last week in the 3 year long Omarosa case found that the Trump campaign’s NDA "went too far by forcing Manigault 'to never say anything remotely critical of Mr. Trump, his family or his or his family members’ businesses for the rest of her life.' [Arbitor Andrew] Brown ruled that 'such a burden is certainly unreasonable.' ... [That ruling] could provide a precedent for MAGA defectors and other spurned associates who, intimidated by the vengefully litigious former president, have kept quiet about some of their inside knowledge."
Trump has cloaked himself in the protection of scary-sounding, multimillion-dollar NDAs throughout his career, political campaigns, and one-term presidency. He wielded them with glee during his years as an NBC reality-TV star, and treasured their utility as the litigious and flamboyant front man of his hereditary business empire. Trump has even invoked the NDAs against people who share his DNA—when it suits him.
[Omarosa] Manigault confirmed that Trump’s business NDAs were nearly identical to his political agreements and Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who had drafted and executed dozens of NDAs on behalf of the Trump Organization, explained the genesis.
“For the most part, the campaign’s NDA is just a version of the organization’s NDA,” Cohen said. “They used it as a template, but it was also the predicate.”
At the beginning of Trump’s 2016 campaign, he continued, there were no NDAs. “But then there were a couple of issues where [then-campaign manager] Corey Lewandowski was leaking shit to the press and cleverly what he did was he started blaming it on interns,” Cohen said. ”Nothing in Trumpworld stays silent for more than a minute, so he starts blaming the interns and that’s when Trump decides he wants everyone to sign an NDA.”
Cohen, however, said he never signed his. “I just threw it straight into the shredder, and they’re so disorganized that they never knew,” he said.
When Trump’s attorneys later tried to enforce the NDA to prevent Cohen from publishing his memoir, Disloyal, he asked them to provide his lawyers “with this supposed NDA I’d signed, and they never did.”
On MSNBC's PoliticsNation last night, Omarosa said that Trump is probably too unhealthy to run for president for real. "I don't know if he will even be healthy enough to run in 2024 and I think he needs to come clean to the American people about where he is on that before getting into a very stressful and strenuous race for the White House." And this morning, on Good Morning America, former Trumpanzee press secretary Stephanie Grisham told George Stephanopoulos that she made a mistake to have ever worked for Trump and now wants to, she said "in whatever way I can, educate the public about the behaviors within the White House, because it does look like he's going to run in 2024." Her tell-all book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, will be released tomorrow.
When pressed by Stephanopoulos on her enabling a culture of casual dishonesty in the White House by never holding a formal briefing, Grisham agreed.
She said she is starting to believe that Trump will wage another bid for the presidency in 2024, pointing to the fact that he is the GOP frontrunner and that a number of Republicans have shown their fealty to him.
She, however, said she hopes her former boss does not run again. She said a second Trump term would be about revenge because he will not have to worry about reelection.
“He will probably have some pretty draconian policies that go on,” Grisham said. “There were conversations a lot of times that people would say, ‘that'll be the second term, that'll be the second term,’ meaning we won't have to worry about, you know, a reelection.”
...Grisham, when asked what she would say to Trump if he were sitting at the interview table, said she would ask him not to run in 2024.
Meanwhile, writing for the Washington Post this morning, Michael Shearer and Josh Dawsey reported that "As turmoil in Afghanistan reached a crescendo in August [Señor T] began talking again with advisers about whether he should announce his 2024 campaign for president right away. They responded by urging patience, according to three people familiar with the discussions, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. An announcement would force a reshuffling of his newly formed fundraising apparatus, advisers argued, and could complicate his ability to appear on broadcast television without triggering equal time rules. Some of his advisers were concerned that Democrats might use his announcement in their effort to frame the midterm elections around his candidacy, potentially boosting their own turnout and hampering his plans if Republicans fall short next year."
Trump is making aggressively hostile sounds in terms of potential rivals for the nomination. He told Yahoo News that he would beat Ron DeSantis in a primary battle. "If I faced him, I'd beat him like I would beat everyone else. I don't think I will face him... I think most people would drop out, I think he would drop out."