What Donald Trump may or may not have known about Eric Schneiderman, and when
Eric Schneiderman is the latest New York Democrat to hold up the filthy mirror Donald Trump needs, and to drag us with them down the rabbit hole. The state attorney general who presented himself as a champion of women and the #resistance resigned Monday even as he denied allegations he called “unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office” by four women who say he choked, slapped and otherwise abused them. Two of those women say he threatened to kill them if they left him. One says he threatened to have her followed and her phone tapped.
A few months before those brave women shared their stories with The New Yorker, I’d asked Schneiderman at a social event what the hell was wrong with Eliot Spitzer, the former AG who resigned as governor because of what he, too, said were “private failings.” Spitzer was back in the news after a Russian escort taped him saying: “You’re going to die a slow painful death and your family is going to look at you and laugh because you’re a f--king bitch.”
Schneiderman told me that Spitzer — who has a long history going back to his time in office of spitting out violent threats — was a smart guy who didn’t have a problem with women, really, just with his temper.
Just after Spitzer’s “private failings” became public in 2008, a message threatening his billionaire father — “you will be arrested and brought to Albany, and there’s not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho piece of s--t son can do about it” — was traced to infamous Republican dirty trickster and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, who offered a series of absurd denials, including a suggestion that it was fellow trickster Randy Credico (later outed as the person who connected Stone and Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign) impersonating him.
Stone seemed thrilled to be in the headlines, giving reporters too-good-to-check stories about how he’d heard about Spitzer’s habit in a Florida swingers club and about the “love gov” supposedly keeping his socks on in the sack.
Client 9, for his part, didn’t seem to mind a story about bad partisan actors bringing down the Sheriff of Wall Street for his venial sin as he quickly hustled to regain the public spotlight with a Slate column, CNN show and finally a “redemption” run for office New Yorkers had the good sense to pass on.
That’d all be old history if not for the unlikely return of Stone. The godfather of the modern conspiracy theory, who in 2010 was helping out on the stunt gubernatorial campaign of the madame who claimed to have been Spitzer’s procurer, now has a direct line to the commander in chief.
Stone’s spiritual godchildren sounded off this week about Schneiderman, with anti-Trump fabulist Louise Mensch declaring “Me Too is, and always has been, Russian propaganda.” Jack Posobiec, the Trumpist who helped “just ask” if Democratic elites were running a pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria, suggested a tie-in between the AG’s fall and the Nxivm sex cult. Others on Twitter took the time to insult and threaten the women who’d detailed their abuse.
A filing Friday morning in the criminal investigation of Trump fixer Michael Cohen from lawyer Peter Gleason poured fresh mud into the murk. Gleason says that two women who alleged Schneiderman had abused them had approached him years earlier and that, after advising one of them not to go to District Attorney Cy Vance’s office, he told a reporter about their claims, who said he’d tell Trump about them. Cohen, Gleason says, had then called to discuss the women’s claims.
This daisychain of deeply unreliable narrators in a court filing supposedly intended to protect the women’s anonymity might help explain Trump’s 2013 tweet, sent as the AG was digging into his fraudulent “university”: “Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone — next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner.”
And the “exclusive” from Trump’s propagandists at the National Enquirer just after the 2016 election: “Trump Has Dirt on Power Players’ Sexploits!” in a “LITTLE BLACK BOOK of Shame.”
Or not. New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer tweeted Friday that “not one source for our story . . . has any tie to Trump or Michael Cohen” and that the women in Gleason’s letter “aren’t our sources.”
I don’t believe Trump knew anything more than gossip then, or he would have used it for more than a tweet as he and the AG locked horns. Schneiderman brought himself down. The characters trying to write themselves into his story and the ones trying to sneak in the backdoor to his old office are just digging us further down this dirty hole.