[Ads-l] one more "tainment"

[Laurence Horn]

> On May 17, 2018, at 9:44 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> A CNN contributor wonders whether the President seeks the "thrill of
> diplotainment that's bound to fail."
> 
> "Diplotainment" seems to have been coined yesterday by Philip Rucker of the
> fake (TM) Washington Post to characterize the current drama between
> Washington and Pyongyang.
> 
> As of today, nearly 21,000 Raw Google hits.
> 
You (Jon in particular, even if the T volume of HDAS hasn’t seen the light of day) may recall the brouhaha a month ago over the deliciously named “taint team”, i.e. "A taint team made up of lawyers who are not involved in the underlying investigation will almost certainly be put in place to review the materials obtained in the raid before those materials are handed over to the prosecutorial team”

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/10/politics/cohen-raid-trump-attorney-client-privilege/index.html

Fittingly, the case prompting the reference to the taint team involves the hush money Michael Cohen now concedes he paid to Stormy Daniels (whether or not under his client’s orders) before the 2016 election. 

As the CNN piece goes on to say, "a taint team is intended to act as a protective buffer between an individual subject to a seizure and prosecutors when material is seized that may be privileged. "The taint team lawyers review the documents and remove anything that is covered by the attorney client privilege," CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote in an email. "They pass the non-attorney client material to the investigators, who are not 'tainted' by contact with the privileged material.”

But there is sure to be a lot of wrangling back and forth between prosecutors and the President’s defense team over the admissibility and scope of such materials, and perhaps we are in for some salacious revelations.  Dare we hope for…diplotaintment?

LH

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