MAINSTREAM MEDIA CREATIONS CAN BE DANGEROUS

Will the Feds flip Julie Swetnick against Michael Avenatti?

Swetnick and Avenatti recently were referred by the Chuck Grassley, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to the DOJ and FBI for criminal investigation with regard to sworn statements submitted by Swetnick. The referral is not limited to perjury, but to any possible crime the evidence might show.

We covered the story previously, Senate Judiciary refers Julie Swetnick and Michael Avenatti for criminal investigation. From the referral announcement:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley today referred Julie Swetnick and her attorney Michael Avenatti to the Justice Department for criminal investigation relating to a potential conspiracy to provide materially false statements to Congress and obstruct a congressional committee investigation, three separate crimes, in the course of considering Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States.

While the Committee was in the middle of its extensive investigation of the late-breaking sexual-assault allegations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Avenatti publicized his client’s allegations of drug- and alcohol-fueled gang rapes in the 1980s. The obvious, subsequent contradictions along with the suspicious timing of the allegations necessitate a criminal investigation by the Justice Department….

The referral methodically details the issues with Swetnick’s allegations as relayed by Avenatti, the immediate diversion of committee resources to investigate those allegations, the subsequent contradictions by both Swetnick and Avenatti, the lack of substantiating or corroborating evidence, and the overarching and serious credibility problems pervading the presentation of these allegations.

There was a second criminal referral, this time just of Avenatti. The second referral concern a sworn statement from a second woman purporting to back up Swetnick’s claims, and submitted by Avenatti. NBC News just recently disclosed, for the first time, that it knew no later than October 3, 2018, three days before that Senate floor vote, that the second sworn statement had been disavowed by the woman making it.

The second referral read, in part:

Yesterday, I wrote to you referring Mr. Michael Avenatti and Ms. Julie Swetnick for investigation of potential violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 371, 1001, and 1505, for materially false statements they made to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the course of the Committee’s investigation into allegations against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. I write today because of important additional information regarding Mr. Avenatti that has since come to the Committee’s attention. In light of this new information, I am now referring Mr. Avenatti for investigation of additional potential violations of those same laws, stemming from a second declaration he submitted to the Committee that also appears to contain materially false statements. As explained below, according to NBC News, the purported declarant of that sworn statement has disavowed its key allegations and claimed that Mr. Avenatti “twisted [her] words.”

We covered this development, and NBC News’ complicity in concealing important information, in NBC News turns on Michael Avenatti over Julie Swetnick, but it concealed problem.

So let’s get back to our thought experiment, in the Swetnick/Avenatti scenario.

It’s not like Avenatti doesn’t understand the pressures the Feds can put on a witness to flip on a lawyer. Avenatti brags that he was the first to predict that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, would flip on Trump: