Bad Lawyers Sometimes Get Good Results

Jim Garrison was the District Attorney for the Orleans Parish in Louisiana from 1962 to 1973, a jurisdiction covering the city of New Orleans. Depending on who you believe, Garrison was a good-hearted crusader for justice or a publicity seeking DA who indicted lots of people but rarely won convictions and was on the take for most of his tenure. This being New Orleans in the 1960s, the two are hardly mutually exclusive.

But Garrison really made a national name for himself when he decided to re-open the investigation of the Kennedy assassination in 1966 and obtained an indictment against businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate the president.  Shaw went to trial and was acquitted in under an hour. But that ill-fated prosecution was the one and only trial for the assassination of JFK. However, Garrison’s ultimate failure also produced a significant amount of new testimony about the assassination, some of which has proven true over time. In addition, it was Garrison’s investigation that finally allowed Americans to see the Zapruder film for the first time. Of course, Garrison’s work also created more fodder for conspiracy theorists that still continues to this day and was the driver for an Oliver Stone movie. (As an aside, an interesting factoid is that Garrison was succeeded as the DA for Orleans Parish by Harry Connick, Sr, the father of Harry Connick, Jr. Garrison himself went on to become a judge.)

If we are to believe the indictments handed down today, Michael Avenatti, after an apparently otherwise blameless life, is a thief, an extortioner, and a charlatan, although it seems like more than just a coincidence that the wheels of justice turned against him as quickly as they did in his case. But regardless of his innocence or guilt and the slippery nature of his character, the fact remains that Michael Avenatti’s work resulted in as many or more convictions directly relating to actual interference in the 2016 election by Trump and his associates than apparently all of Robert Mueller’s work.

Without the Stormy Daniels’ suit against Donald Trump, it is possible that we may never have known about the President’s payoffs to Daniels and Karen McDougal that were judged felony violations of campaign finance law. Michael Cohen was convicted on that count among others and the President was named as Individual 1 who coordinated the conspiracy to violate the law. In essence, Donald Trump is an indicted felon awaiting his return to civilian life to make that determination a reality. And without that conviction against Cohen and his resulting testimony, driven by Avenatti’s original lawsuit, it is quite possible that there would still be no investigation into possible bank, insurance, and tax fraud by the Trump Organization. That again seems to be more than Mueller even attempted. We would also probably not have a window into the ease and cost of buying access to this administration and the range of supposedly reputable companies that would engage in that process, again something far beyond Mueller’s purview.

I’m not saying Avenatti is a good guy; far from it. And I’m not saying Avenatti and Garrison are in any way alike. What I am saying is that sometimes some, shall we say, non-traditional lawyers can help move a case that the government is actually uninterested in pursuing. And I would expect, when large parts of the Mueller report are never released to the American public, as I also expect, that some ambitious and enterprising young lawyer or DA, probably in a safely Democratic area, will find some legal angle to discover just what people like Don Jr. and Jared Kushner were up to in 2016 and how much of their activity Donald Trump knew of and directed.