THE LAWLESS LAWYER CLASS - Michael Avenatti Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Trying to Extort Nike - But how many years would he have gotten if he were not a fucking lawyer???

BLOG EDITOR: THE DEFINITION OF A LAWYER IS ONE WHO  TRAINED IN LAW SCHOOL TO LIE, STEAL CHEAT, ORCHESTRATE PERJURY, COMMIT PERJURY AND GAME THE LEGAL SYSTEM. THERE IS NO PROFESSION THAT DRAWS THE SOCIOPATH MORE THAN LAWYERING. 

THESE ARE PARASITES WHO PROTECTED BY A JUDICIAL THAT SIMPLY COULDN'T GET MORE CORRUPT. 

THE JOB OF THE JUDICIAL IS TO PROTECT CRIMINAL LAWYERS FROM THEIR VICTIMS

AS A NATION, WE MAY NOT SURVIVE THE LAWLESS CRIMES OF BILLARY CLINTON (DISBARRED & IMPEACHED), LAWYER HILLARY  CLINTON, LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER ERIC HOLDER, LAWYER JOE BIDEN, LAWYER HUNTER BIDEN, LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER SHADY LAWYER HUSBAND WHO SALTED AWAY THE DEALS KAMALA PERPETRATED FOR BRIBES.

Michael Avenatti Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Trying to Extort Nike

Scott Olson/Getty Images

JOSHUA CAPLAN

8 Jul 2021772

1:23

A judge on Thursday afternoon handed down a 30-month prison sentence to disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti — who rose to national prominence purely by casting himself as a left-wing champion fighting former President Donald Trump — for attempting to extort Nike for up to $25 million.

Avenatti’s punishment is less than the nine to eleven year range per federal guidelines and is likely to disappoint federal prosecutors, who sought a “substantial” sentence.

“Mr. Avenatti’s conduct was outrageous,” stated Judge Paul Gardephe said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. “He hijacked his client’s claims, and he used him to further his own agenda, which was to extort Nike millions of dollars for himself.”

“He outright betrayed his client,” the judge added. “Mr. Avenatti had become drunk on the power of his platform, or what he perceived the power of his platform to be.”

Avenatti broke into tears while addressing the court ahead of his sentencing, saying: “I am truly sorry for all of the pain I caused.”

“I alone have destroyed my career, my relationships and my life. And there is no doubt I need to pay,” Avenatti admitted.

Criminal fraud charges on two coasts disrupted Avenatti’s rapid ascent to fame. He also faces the start of a fraud trial next week in the Los Angeles area, a second California criminal trial later this year and a separate trial next year in Manhattan, where he is charged with cheating Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Avenatti represented Daniels in 2018 in lawsuits against Trump, appearing often on cable news programs to disparage the Republican president. Avenatti explored running against Trump in 2020, boasting that he would “have no problem raising money.” Daniels said a tryst with Trump a decade earlier resulted in her being paid $130,000 by Trump’s personal lawyer in 2016 to stay silent. Trump denied the affair.

Those political aspirations evaporated when prosecutors in California and New York charged Avenatti with fraud in March 2019. California prosecutors said he was enjoying a $200,000-a-month lifestyle while cheating clients out of millions of dollars and failing to pay hundreds of thousands to the Internal Revenue Service.

Charges alleging he cheated Daniels out of proceeds from a book deal followed weeks later. Avenatti pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Michael Avenatti Faces Sentencing in Nike Extortion Scheme

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

AP

8 Jul 20217

4:01

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Avenatti, the brash California lawyer who publicly sparred with then-President Donald Trump before criminal fraud charges on two coasts disrupted his rapid ascent to fame, faces sentencing in one of those cases Thursday.

Over a year after a jury concluded Avenatti tried to extort millions of dollars from Nike by threatening the company with bad publicity, U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe will sentence him in Manhattan. Avenatti was convicted on charges that he tried to extort up to $25 million from the Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear giant as he represented a Los Angeles youth basketball league organizer upset Nike had ended its league sponsorship.

Regardless of the outcome, Avenatti faces trials in Los Angeles later this year on fraud charges and a separate trial next year in Manhattan, where he is charged with cheating his former client — the porn star Stormy Daniels — of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Avenatti, 50, represented Daniels in 2018 in lawsuits against Trump, appearing often on cable news programs to disparage the Republican as he explored running for president against Trump in 2020, boasting he’d “have no problem raising money.” Daniels said a decade-earlier tryst with Trump led her to be paid $130,000 by Trump’s personal lawyer in 2016 to stay silent. Trump denied the affair.

Talk of those aspirations evaporated when prosecutors in Los Angeles and New York charged him with fraud in March 2019. Prosecutors in Los Angeles said he was enjoying a $200,000-a-month lifestyle while cheating clients of millions of dollars and the Internal Revenue Service of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Charges alleging he cheated Daniels of proceeds from a book deal followed weeks later. Avenatti pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Prosecutors have requested a “very substantial” sentence, citing the U.S. Probation Department’s recommendation of an eight-year prison term. Avenatti’s lawyers said six months in prison and a year of home detention was enough punishment.

On Tuesday, Gardephe rejected a request by Avenatti’s lawyers to toss out his conviction in the Nike case on attempted extortion and honest services fraud charges. The judge wrote that evidence showed that Avenatti “devised an approach to Nike that was designed to enrich himself” rather than address his client’s objectives.

In written sentencing arguments, prosecutors said Avenatti tried to enrich himself by “weaponizing his public profile” to try to force Nike to submit to his demands.

In a victim impact statement, Nike’s lawyers said Avenatti did considerable harm to the company by falsely trying to link it to a scandal in which bribes were paid to the families of NBA-bound college basketball players to steer them to powerhouse programs. An employee of Adidas, a Nike competitor, was convicted in that prosecution.

The lawyers said Avenatti threatened to do billions of dollars of damage to Nike and then falsely tweeted that criminal conduct at Nike reached the “highest levels.”

Avenatti’s former client, Gary Franklin Jr., said in a statement submitted by prosecutors that Avenatti’s action had “devastated me financially, professionally, and emotionally.” Franklin was expected in court Thursday.

In their presentence submission, Avenatti’s lawyers said their client had suffered enough, citing enormous public shame and a difficult stint in jail last year that ended after lawyers said he was particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus.

Although prosecutors asked Gardephe to impose a $1 million restitution order to help cover Nike’s legal expenses, Avenatti’s attorneys cited the lack of financial losses as a reason for leniency.

“There was no financial loss to any victims so there is no restitution in this case,” they wrote. “The fact that a white collar federal criminal case was brought despite this fact is itself an important mitigating factor.”

Bill Barr re-emerges, spotlights total corruption of the Department of Justice

By Todd Gregory and Erik Gregory

Six months after resigning as attorney general, William Barr recently re-entered the spotlight, reportedly telling friendly news correspondent Jonathan Karl that allegations of vote fraud during the 2020 election are bull.  Now that civilian Bill Barr has jumped back into the political fray, it is time to take unflinching stock of the degraded Department of Justice (DOJ) and how it became even further corrupted during Barr's reign.

In reviewing the attorney general's passivity during his tenure, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Barr's inaction was born of anything other than profound fear of the progressive, hydra-headed agency he ostensibly led.  Indeed, during his nearly two years on the job, the nation's top cop repeatedly gave interviews in which he alluded to criminal wrongdoing on the part of the Obama administration and senior leaders of Obama's intelligence agencies, which spied on the Trump campaign and later sought to remove Trump from office on a variety of increasingly implausible and comically specious pretexts.  Yet, despite all of Barr's talk, there was never any accountability for the malefactors. 

Given the elastic timeframes and endless delays concluding the John Durham–led probe into the origins of the Russia hoax-cum-coup that crippled Trump's presidency, it is worth asking whether Barr cravenly provided the president and the public with false assurances that he and Durham were indeed making a good-faith effort to root out the rampant corruption within the DOJ, coupled with false promises that the coup's participants would be brought to justice.  Did Barr make a calculated decision to buy time, carrying water for the administrative state he so fears, while deliberately running out the clock on President Trump?  Did Barr bank his hopes on Trump's defeat in the 2020 election so the entire five-year, government-wide effort to defenestrate Trump could be flushed away down the memory hole?

In reviewing nearly two years of the Barr-led DOJ, it is instructive to reflect on the two-tiered nature of justice at the DOJ.  Several mysterious deaths remain unexplained, among them the 2016 murder of Democrat operative Seth Rich and the "suicides" of the politically connected pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney.  What did these seemingly unrelated events have in common?  The suddenly deceased were all in a position to reveal enormously incriminating information about prominent Democrats.  It is not a "conspiracy theory" to observe that the DOJ seems to have no interest in investigating these highly suspicious deaths.

Similarly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under the DOJ, continues to sit idly on the information gleaned from Hunter Biden's laptop over the past two years, likely in an effort to conceal the evident corruption of Democrat President Joe Biden.  Further, the DOJ seems unconcerned by the apparent immigration fraud and ballot-harvesting activities of prominent Democrats like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.  Neither has the DOJ (nor the intelligence agencies) evinced much interest in infiltrating and bringing to justice criminal groups like Antifa, which deploy violent left-wing shock troops to wreak havoc on the nation's streets.  And the DOJ, while searching frenetically under every bed in America for straw men to slay, whether Russian bots or white nationalists (WSEs, whatever those are), has no interest in prosecuting FBI agents who use taxpayer dollars to engage in prurient pursuits like child pornography while on the job.  

Recall the case of John Huber, U.S. attorney and Obama appointee, who closed his nearly three-year "investigation" into connections between the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One with no findings of any illegality whatsoever.  Fellow U.S. attorney John Durham appears scarcely different.  Nearly two years after his appointment to investigate the origins of the Russia hoax, Durham has secured one minor guilty plea (a false statement charge) from somebody named Kevin Clinesmith, more of an extra in a Greek chorus than a key player in the five-year (and counting) effort to destroy Trump.  Occasional leaks from the DOJ to the media indicate that the real key players, former president Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, are at no risk of being found culpable for any malfeasance.

It seems likely that Barr and Durham slow-walked their probe from the start, in fear of the demonstrated ruthless wrath of the DOJ.  The Potemkin village of an "investigation" into the origins of the Russia hoax will likely be formally disbanded soon, just as Jeffrey Epstein and others were conveniently disappeared.  Then Durham, like Barr, can safely return to private life, out of the crosshairs of the intelligence agencies; write self-serving memoirs; and complain about how he and his investigation were disrespected and obstructed by Trump every step of the way. 

Years of stonewalling from Barr and Durham, redundant pleas for more time, and endless dissembling — and, yes, abject dereliction of duty — can all be rationalized away.  What (if anything) did the two vaunted lawmen accomplish over the past two years, and why do they refuse to release any meaningful findings to the public?

It is crystal-clear that the DOJ is beyond reform, staffed almost entirely by careerist vipers who failed up, pursuing their own progressive political agendas and enriching themselves at the nation's expense.  Law-abiding conservative citizens are now subject to the tender mercies of a new attorney general, Merrick Garland, a warrior for the progressive cause who unambiguously serves at the pleasure of the hard left. 

Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who essentially forfeited their lives to expose massive surveillance state abuses during the Obama era, never got the pardons they deserved.  But they still have their honor and their dignity.  The same cannot be said of Bill Barr.

Image: Office of Public Affairs via Flickr.