White House counselor Kellyanne Conway dipped and dodged for several minutes on Sunday, refusing to answer for President Donald Trump’s contradictory statements about his knowledge of a hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with Trump more than a decade ago.
“There you want to look at the President’s tweets, where he says ‘through reimbursement,” Conway told CNN’s Jake Tapper during an interview Sunday, asked why Trump claimed last month that he did not know where his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, got the money to make the payment.
“You’ve got to look at his tweets, because he responds to that. And that’s, honestly Jake, that’s the best I can do given my limited visibility in the legal matters.”
In the tweets to which Conway was referring, Trump claims that Cohen was paid a monthly retainer from which he drew the funds to pay Daniels. But Trump hasn’t explained why, months after the story of the payment broke publicly, he denied knowing where the money for the payment came from.
While claiming during the interview that she had no reason to believe Trump was lying about the payment — which may have constituted a violation of campaign finance law — Conway simultaneously claimed she did not know enough about it to defend Trump’s contradictory statements.
In interviews on Wednesday and Thursday, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani revealed that Trump had paid Cohen back for the $130,000 Cohen paid Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, to stay quiet about the affair.
The New York Times reported Friday that Trump knew about the hush money payment months before denying knowledge of it.
Watch part of the exchange below via CNN:
Kellyanne Conway says she is not aware of any other hush payments and claims that President Trump did not know “when the payment occurred” about the $130,000 hush payment to Stormy Daniels when asked about it in April https://t.co/AGC7romMH8 https://t.co/vYTAcuDca5
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) May 6, 2018
