One sign that Everything Is Fine is when your lawyer has a lawyer. So it goes with President Donald J. Trump, whose personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has his own legal counsel, David Schwartz.

Cohen is the certified brain genius who yelled Fake News in response to a Wall Street Journal story detailing how he paid $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. That is, until he admitted to The New York Times that he made the payment, but Trump never heard about it. All of this is, of course, absurd.

Fast forward to now, and Cohen's lawyer—that's Trump's lawyer's lawyer—has been making the cable news rounds in defense of his client. This is about as good an idea as putting Cohen on cable news, which once led to the "Says Who?" Incident of 2016.



On CNN Wednesday night, Schwartz argued Trump was never aware of the NDA contract with Stormy Daniels, so it will be hard to argue it should be enforced. This is the exact same argument Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is making, so it's probably a bad one for Cohen's lawyer to make.

But it turns out he was only just getting started. On Megyn Kelly's NBC show Thursday morning, Schwartz did such bad lawyering that the studio audience started laughing in his face on national television.

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Schwartz's first faux pas was to admit Cohen made the payment to prevent negative news about Trump emerging shortly before Election Day:

You gotta see the way this all comes down. First off he got approached, OK, he got approached 19 days or 15 days before the election. He got approached—it’ll take $130,000 to make this go away.

Since $130,000 is well above the federal limit for an individual contribution, this would be a violation of campaign finance law.

Next up was Daniels' claim on 60 Minutes she was threatened by a man in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011. Kelly asked Schwartz if Cohen had a habit of threatening people who crossed his bossman, and Schwartz just kept on lawyering:

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Schwartz admitted he'd "heard that through the grapevine," an interesting way to defuse the suggestion Cohen had ordered the man to visit Daniels in the parking lot. But the real winner was when, after Kelly showed the aggressive threats Cohen lobbed at Daily Beast reporters, Schwartz jumped right out and said “everyone should want an employee like this." At that point, the audience literally started to laugh at him, which Kelly made sure he noticed:

They are laughing at you openly, David.

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Apparently, all this is an attempt to counter the media savvy of Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti. Maybe it would be best to cede this battle, or find Cohen a lawyer who is not an even worse lawyer than Cohen. Otherwise, there might even be another layer of lawyers, when Trump's lawyer's lawyer hires a lawyer.



(H/T: ThinkProgress)



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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