More on Paul Campos' Trump-Broidy Theory

Two weeks ago, I linked in the We Resist thread a detailed piece by Paul Campos at NYMag, in which he laid out his theory that former deputy RNC finance chair Elliott Broidy was taking the fall for Donald Trump in the second hush payment arranged by Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Per a Wall Street Journal report in April, it was Broidy for whom Cohen ostensibly arranged the hush payment with former Playmate Shera Bechard. But Campos suspects, and has laid out his case, that it was actually Trump on whose behalf Cohen made the agreement and Broidy made the payment.

Today, Campos has a follow-up: Hey, Look: More Evidence That Broidy May Have Been Covering for Trump in That Playmate Affair.

The AP exposé only strengthens the evidence for my hypothesis: The first payment from Broidy came two days before the meeting that apparently helped him ink a nine-figure deal with a foreign country — a deal based in no small part on his access to, and influence on, Trump.

If it's difficult to imagine Broidy being willing to take the fall for Trump's affair with Bechard and then paying her a seven-figure sum, it's much simpler to imagine it simply as a perfectly timed and fantastically profitable bribe.

The whole thing is worth your time to read, particularly so you can understand the quid-pro-quo that Campos has uncovered.

I will just highlight one additional bit (emphases mine):

Four days after after the raid on Cohen's office, on April 13, The Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that this David Dennison, in the NDA signed by Shera Bechard, was none other than Elliott Broidy — despite its being precisely the same pseudonym Trump had used in the Stormy Daniels NDA.

The paper's basis for its scoop was this: Whoever leaked the existence of the Bechard NDA to the Journal also asserted that the agreement was between Bechard and Broidy. The Journal's reporters confronted Broidy, and Broidy immediately confessed to having had a long-running affair with Bechard, and subsequently agreeing to pay her $1.6 million to buy her silence about it. The first payment of the agreement was supposed to be due on December 1, 2017. That is the story Broidy told the Journal, and that story has, remarkably enough, become accepted as simple fact. Indeed, the AP concludes its bombshell exposé of Broidy's machinations by observing that Broidy had gotten Shera Bechard pregnant, and had "agreed to pay her $1.6 million to help her out, as long as she never spoke about it."

...It's also important to keep in mind that the only hard evidence for Broidy's claim that his payoff to Bechard wasn't actually a straight-up bribe of the president of the United States continues to be Broidy's own assertions. (My repeated attempts to get Bechard's current attorney, Peter Stris, to comment on this matter have been unsuccessful.) Journalists — including those AP reporters who pulled together such a remarkable and important story — might want to be cautious about taking Broidy's word on the matter at face value.

Broidy's word is the only "proof" we have that the payoff was made to silence Shera Bechard as a result of Broidy having an affair with her and subsequently paying for an abortion. (Bechard is, of course, bound by an NDA tied to the payment.) But Broidy has a massive incentive to lie: $600 million in contracts from the United Arab Emirates and continued access to a president (access on which those lucrative contracts are based) who might only remain president as long as the truth about the affair remains concealed.

As I said before, I don't know if Campos' theory is true, but I do find it credible.

And then there's this: I don't imagine that the ultra-paranoid Trump would allow Cohen to use his preferred pseudonym for another client. That detail alone makes me inclined to believe Campos is right, frankly.

I always thought that was very strange: Trump is too paranoid to allow that sort of thing, in case anyone ever did figure out one "David Dennison" was him, because then they'd reasonably suspect all the David Dennisons were him.

Which is exactly what people would be thinking, if Broidy hadn't volunteered his own head on a platter.

Welp.

[H/T to Shaker SKM.]