Trump once denied he paid off Stormy Daniels. Now he says it 'was not a campaign contribution.'
President Trump on Thursday signaled a shift in his defense over allegations by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that Trump directed him to make hush money payments to two women before the 2016 election.
“It was not a campaign contribution,” Trump tweeted, “and there were no violations of the campaign finance laws by me. Fake News!”
When he was first questioned about the story by reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump denied knowing about such payments. When asked why Cohen would’ve made the payments if the allegations were not true, he said, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.”
In January 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels, who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. At the time, Trump had been married to his wife, Melania, for less than two years.
Trump has denied reports of the relationship and claimed he had no knowledge of payoffs to Daniels or another woman, Karen McDougal.
Last year, when Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges involving campaign finance fraud related to the hush money payments, he implicated Trump, saying he made them “at the direction of” the president.
During his appearance before the House Oversight Committee last week, Cohen submitted a $35,000 check he says Trump gave to him in July 2017 in partial reimbursement of the payment to Daniels. He told the committee there are a total of 11 checks issued by Trump himself or Trump associates that year.
Cohen also said he was told by Trump to lie to reporters about the president’s knowledge of the payments. He is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence stemming from the hush-money scheme, and lying to Congress, in May.
Legal experts are divided over whether Trump’s personal involvement could leave him open to criminal charges. It would depend in part on whether he knew that the payments were made to influence the election by keeping news of the affairs from the public. The Trump campaign did not report the expenditures as part of its filing of election expenses.
A separate issue is how the payments were reported to the IRS. The check Cohen presented was drawn on Trump’s personal account and signed by him, but at least two others were drawn on his “revocable trust,” which holds his business interests, and signed by his son, Donald Jr., and by Allen Weisselberg, CFO of the Trump Organization. If the payments were disguised as a retainer for legal services by Cohen and treated as a business expense, that could constitute a tax-code violation.
Some of the president’s supporters have suggested that if Trump did lie about the payments, it was only to protect the feelings of his family.
“I honestly think this president loves his family,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said in an interview with CNN Wednesday. “And I think it has as much to do with trying not to have public discussions about something that is, for him, a private matter that he didn’t want to have discussed with his family.”
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