President Donald Trump on Thursday asserted he was unaware that his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 for her to keep quiet about an alleged affair she’d had years earlier with Trump.
Asked if he knew about the payment while traveling on Air Force One, Trump said “no,” according to pool reporter Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal.
A reporter asked why Cohen made the payment.
“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” Trump said. “Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”
Do you know where the money came from? a reporter asked.
“No, I don’t know,” Trump said.
Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, responded with a statement to TPM within minutes of the breaking news.
“Our case just got that much better,” he said. “And we very much look forward to testing the truthfulness of Mr. Trump’s feigned lack of knowledge concerning the $130k payment as he stated on Air Force One. As history teaches us, it is one thing to deceive the press and quite another to do so under oath.”
Ballhaus later reported: “Trump ignored a question on whether he ever set up a fund of money that Cohen could draw from.”
Watch below:
Audio is pretty poor. But here’s Trump saying he didn’t know anything about the $130k to Stormy Daniels. pic.twitter.com/QBBaugUTTO
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 5, 2018
Trump Claims Ignorance
No one is surprised.
If he wasn’t aware of the agreement, then he could not have agreed (unless he gave Cohen a power of attorney, which has not been asserted and seems completely out of character for a control freak like tRump), and as he is a necessary party, there must have been no agreement.
Yup. The madam’s a virgin.
Trump’s lips were moving, so of course we know he is lying. Trump is completely incapable of telling the truth about anything!
Such a catch-22 for these fools. If I was Cohen’s attorney, I’d be seriously considering defending against charges of criminal campaign finance violations by showing that the timing was just coincidental, i.e., that Cohen does this all the time by rote to clean up President Affluenza’s messes…show the jury a stack of 100 NDA’s signed by idiots who slept with him, etc., and argue there was nothing special about the one with Stormy other than coincidental and inconvenient timing. The problem with that is, that makes it look like Trump couldn’t possibly be ignorant of it, because it’s SOP and he’s clearly in on the game.
In any event, Trump’s denial isn’t even credible in the first place, so meh.