"They fell for Avenatti because he said what they wanted to hear. They abominate William Barr because he refuses to drink the Kool-Aid."

In Spectator USA, Roger Kimball notes that

yesterday, the final nail was jackhammered into the political coffin of Michael Avenatti, known the world over, thanks to Tucker Carlson, as the ‘creepy porn lawyer.’

...Avenatti was arrested and charged with embezzlement and extortion in March. That was just a warm-up act, however. Yesterday, the man who made trips to New Hampshire to test his political potency for 2020, who spoke before a number of high-powered Democratic groups, the man who between March 7 and mid-May 2018 was on MSNBC and CNN 108 times spouting anti-Trump hysteria, the man who suborned pathetic women to makeup preposterous libels about Brett Kavanaugh — well, that chap yesterday was slapped with a 36-count indictment for bribery, tax fraud, and embezzlement that could earn him an all-expense-paid suite at a government facility for three-hundred and something years.

There are lots of delicious tidbits in the indictment. I think my favorite was the charge that Avenatti diddled Geoffrey Ernest Johnson, a mentally handicapped paraplegic, out of a $4 million settlement. ‘Johnson’s settlement payout,’ the Los Angeles Times reported, ‘was wired to Avenatti in January 2015. Avenatti did not inform Johnson of the settlement. Instead, he deposited the money in several bank accounts, including one for his race-car team, GB Autosport, LLC, and Global Baristas US, a coffee company that Avenatti owned.’

...The case of Michael Avenatti should be an admonitory tale. Watching Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, and their enablers in the media tergiversate hysterically over Attorney General William Barr’s common-sense observation about the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign, I suspect that no lesson has been learned. They fell for Avenatti because he said what they wanted to hear. They abominate William Barr because he refuses to drink the Kool-Aid.

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