“I will have no choice but to sue each of you and your publication for defamation,” Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti wrote in his email to a Daily Caller reporter. | Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images Avenatti threatens conservative outlet Stormy Daniels’ lawyer calls out Daily Caller News Foundation for alleged ‘hit pieces.’

On Sunday, a national news outlet published a report about a high-profile public figure who allegedly failed to pay his bills, has a past marked by legal conflict, and, according to a juicy anonymous quote, is a voracious self-promoter who craves attention. On Monday, the aggrieved subject threatened to sue the reporters.

If that sounds like it could be a story about President Donald Trump, it turns out that the subject was actually his number one public antagonist, Michael Avenatti.


The report, published by the conservative Daily Caller News Foundation, included the allegation that Avenatti, when he owned a coffee chain, stiffed a wholesale roaster on $160,000 in bills. It also cited a March complaint to the California State Bar by vendors accusing Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, of running a “pump and dump scheme,” and quoted from a 2013 lawsuit affidavit from Avenatti’s business partner, the actor Patrick Dempsey, accusing Avenatti of misrepresenting how the venture would be funded. In the story, Avenatti denied all allegations.

On Monday, the lawyer sent an email to Daily Caller reporter Peter Hasson, threatening to sue. He marked the text as “off the record,” but Hasson never agreed to the condition. Hasson tweeted the email and published a story on it.

“Let me be clear. If you and your colleagues do not stop with the hit pieces that are full of lies and defamatory statements, I will have no choice but to sue each of you and your publication for defamation,” Avenatti wrote in his email to Hasson.

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“During that process, we will expose your publication for what it truly is. We will also recover significant damages against each of you that participated personally. So if I were you, I would tell Mr. Trump to find someone else to fabricate things about me.”

Avenatti concluded, “If you think I’m kidding, you really don’t know anything about me. This is the last warning.”

Reached by POLITICO on Monday, Avenatti confirmed that the email was from him. “All attorneys are not ethical nor are all journalists,” he said in an email. He added, “They purposely failed to follow basic journalistic standards, misstated facts, ignored facts that did not fit their predetermined narrative, and failed to properly seek comment. This is not an exhaustive list of their unethical conduct.”

Avenatti declined to go into more detail about those claims, saying, “We will include more detail when and if we file a complaint in lawsuit.”

He did not offer proof of a connection between the story and Trump.

Daily Caller News Foundation editor-in-chief Christopher Bedford pushed back against Avenatti’s claims, saying in an email, “Unethical? Ridiculous. I absolutely stand by our reporting.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation is a nonprofit organization which allows sites that agree to its conditions to run its stories. Though it is a separate organization from The Daily Caller website, the site frequently runs its stories, as it did with the piece on Avenatti.

Bedford also defended publishing Avenatti’s email today. “Here's what off-the-record is: An agreement between two parties to not officially attribute information,” Bedford said. “It's a principle my team holds sacred. Now here's what it isn't: An unagreed-to precursor to threaten our reporter in secret.”

Observers on Twitter couldn’t help but note the parallels between Avenatti going after The Daily Caller reporters and Trump’s aggressive stance toward the press.

“This is the sort of intimidation tactic, suggesting a complete contempt for what reporters do, that someone like Michael Cohen would use,” CNN political analyst Ryan Lizza tweeted.

“I'm sure I'm not the first person to observe this,” FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver tweeted, “but Avenatti seems quite Trumpian in both loving media attention and acting quite contemptuously toward the free press.”

