President Donald Trump on Wednesday released his annual financial disclosure, including in it a note that he paid his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, back for an expense listed at between “$100,001–250,000.”
The note appeared to reflect the hush money payment Cohen sent adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016, and for which, according to Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, Trump paid Cohen back personally.
Read Trump’s financial disclosure in full here (or see the relevant page below).
Despite Trump’s claim in a footnote attached to the disclosure that the payment was “not required to be disclosed as ‘reportable liabilities’” — in other words, that Trump contests it was not technically a debt he owed Cohen — the Office of Government Ethics said differently.
A note by “Reviewing Officials” at OGE on the disclosure reads: “OGE has concluded that the information related to the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported and that the information provided meets the disclosure requirement for a reportable liability.”
In a letter to the Department of Justice, OGE’s Acting Director David Apol noted: “I am providing both [the 2017 and 2018 financial disclosure] reports to you because you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the President’s prior report that was signed on June 14, 2017.”
Walter Shaub, the former director of OGE now at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, said in a tweet that Apol’s letter to the Justice Department was “tantamount to a criminal referral.”
See Trump’s footnote below:
This post has been updated.
That damn tangled web again, and Trump without his aerosol can of Raid™
Yep. There it is.
Of course he was screwed if he didn’t report it and screwed if he did. What a tangled web we weave…
The form indicates that Trump is not required to disclose the expense. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t recall any previous President having disclosed payments to porn actresses, so I guess Donnie is just much more honest than the rest of them… unless you believe that Obama and the two Bushes were not horn-dogging porn actresses and Playboy Bunnies at every opportunity.
WTF is this hose bag doing sitting in the Oval Office?
We already knew that, Giuliani told us and Trump confirmed. But WTF , last year everybody wanted to give Michael Cohen money for no work . He probably tattoed “2017” on his chest to remember the good times.
This entire regime is a reportable liability.