Michael Avenatti, the disgraced attorney who once represented adult film star Stormy Daniels, said he has been in contact with Donald Trump’s legal team about testifying in the former president’s New York trial, according to a report from the New York Post.
Avenatti is serving a 19-year sentence at a low-security prison in Los Angeles for various extortion, fraud, and embezzlement convictions, including identity theft and wire fraud for stealing from Daniels. He told the outlet from prison that he would be “more than happy to testify” in the Trump trial and that he had been in touch with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s legal team “for the better part of a year.”
A grand jury voted to indict Trump on March 30, 2023. He stands accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to Daniels for the alleged affair they had in 2006.
Avenatti said he did not know what he would be called to testify, but doing so on Trump’s behalf would mark a departure from his previous stance on the former president, which, in a 2018 op-ed for the New York Times, even included calling for him to be indicted. The lawyer, who has been disbarred in California since he was convicted, likened his situation to Trump’s and called the charges he faces “politically motivated.”
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“I think that we were both targeted by the justice system,” Avenatti said. “There’s a lot of people on the left that were very concerned about my potential rise within the Democratic Party and my potential rise in Democratic politics. And the fact that I was not someone that was easily controlled.”
The trial is less than a week in, and by Friday, all 12 jurors and six alternates had been sworn in. Trump’s three other criminal trials have not started, and it is not clear when they will.
