Tag: porn star hush money
Schiff: Court Papers Show Trump Could Have Been Charged

Schiff: Court Papers Show Trump Could Have Been Charged

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

New evidence emerged Thursday related to the campaign finance crime that helped put former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen in prison. A judge unsealed court documents in the case, indicating that the investigation has concluded and revealing extensive communications between Cohen, then-candidate Donald Trump, and campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks.

According to House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, the new materials show that were Trump not the president, “he would be criminally charged as Cohen’s co-conspirator.”

“The documents unsealed in the SDNY case against Michael Cohen demonstrate that Donald Trump was intimately involved in devising and executing a corrupt scheme to prevent his affair with Stormy Daniels from being revealed in the final weeks of the 2016 election,” Schiff said. “They show that contrary to his public statements for months afterwards seeking to distance himself from the payments that were made to Daniels, and another woman, Karen McDougal, he authorized the illegal payment of hush money, and coordinated doing so with his attorney, Cohen, and his Press Secretary, Hope Hicks.”

He added: “The inescapable conclusion from all of the public materials available now is that there was ample evidence to charge Donald Trump with the same criminal election law violations for which Michael Cohen pled guilty and is now serving time in prison.”

Schiff noted that Attorney General Bill Barr’s ties to the investigation conducted out of the Southern District of New York should be scrutinized. Barr, Schiff pointed out, has already testified publicly that he believes it is acceptable for the president to shut down an investigation of himself if he thinks it’s “unfair.”

“Barr has demonstrated there are no lengths to which he will not go to protect the President, and I believe it is of paramount importance to determine if he had any involvement in the SDNY’s investigation or sought to bring it to a close,” Schiff said.

Trump has denied having affairs with McDougal and Daniels. He also denied knowing about the hush money, but the evidence strongly suggests — and Cohen has testified — that that is false.

Cohen is serving three years in prison in part for his participation in the hush money payments. Because the payments were intended to help Trump’s chances in the election and were therefore campaign contributions, campaign finance law requires that they should have been formally reported. Instead, Cohen has admitted, they were illegally concealed.

New Documents Indicate Trump Knew About Hush Payments

New Documents Indicate Trump Knew About Hush Payments

Unsealed FBI documents show concrete links between Trump, Michael Cohen, Hope Hicks, and criminal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.

New documents unsealed on Thursday show Trump and his longtime attorney Michael Cohen exchanging a flurry of phone calls in October 2016, around the time Cohen made criminal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, one of Trump’s mistresses, NBC News reports.

The phone calls, not all of which involved Trump, also included Trump advisers Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway, as well as high-level staff for American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer.

“Based on the timing of these calls, and the content of the text messages and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford [Daniels’s legal name] from going public, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story,” one FBI agent wrote.

The “Access Hollywood” tape showed Trump making vulgar comments, including admitting to being a serial sexual predator who would grab women “by the pussy” when he felt like it. In the wake of the scandal, the Trump campaign scrambled to keep at least two of Trump’s mistresses from talking about their affairs with Trump.

Trump has long denied any knowledge of the $130,000 hush money payment Cohen made to purchase Daniels’ silence in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign. But the new document cast doubt on Trump’s veracity.

In December 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to making the illegal hush money payment. In documents from the Southern District of New York, prosecutors disclosed that Trump was an active participant in the crime, identifying him as “Individual 1.”

“Just to make it crystal clear, New York federal prosecutors concluded that the President of the United States committed a felony,” CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti said at the time.

The unsealed documents provide significant evidence that Trump knew what Cohen was doing.

“It’s impossible to believe, though, that Trump himself was unaware of the Daniels discussion Oct. 8,” the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump wrote Thursday. “The idea that the Daniels issue didn’t come up … defies believability.”

Cohen maintains that he committed criminal acts at the direction of Trump, as he reiterated in a statement he made Thursday from prison.

“As I stated in my open testimony, I and members of the Trump Organization were directed by Mr. Trump to handle the Stormy Daniels’ matter, including making the hush-money payment,” he said.

The unsealed FBI documents seem to give Cohen’s account more credibility than Trump’s denials have.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Danziger: Another Fine Mess

Danziger: Another Fine Mess

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Giuliani: Trump Repaid $130,000 Porn Star Hush Money To Cohen

Giuliani: Trump Repaid $130,000 Porn Star Hush Money To Cohen

Rudy Giuliani told Fox News on Wednesday evening that President Trump had indeed reimbursed his attorney Michael Cohen for $130,000 in hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in the months before the 2016 presidential election.

The former New York mayor, who recently joined Trump’s legal defense team, told host Sean Hannity that the payment “is going to turn out to be perfectly legal; that money was not campaign money.” He said, “Sorry, I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know,” and added that the payment had been “funneled through a law firm, and then the president repaid it….He didn’t know the specifics of it, he knew the general arrangement.”

Giuliani’s surprising remarks contradict Trump’s own statement last month that he knew nothing of Cohen’s payment to Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. Asked by reporters during a flight on Air Force One whether he had known about the payment, Trump replied “No” — and quickly referred further questions to “my attorney, Michael Cohen.” Trump recently admitted that Cohen represented him in dealing with Daniels.

In keeping with Hannity’s style, Giuliani launched a blustering attack on his client’s adversaries, calling former FBI director James Comey “a pathological liar,” referring to law enforcement agents who seized Cohen’s records and electronic equipment last month as “storm-troopers,” and scolding that Attorney General Jeff Sessions “should not have appointed” Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general. (Actually it was the president, not the attorney general, who appointed Rosenstein.)

Responding to the Giuliani interview, Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatii at first declared himself “speechless.” But appearing on MSNBC shortly after Giuliani spoke, Avenatti said: “The President of the United States should not be lying to people about this. There may be campaign finance issues, money laundering, bank fraud. This is a very serious matter that deserves the attention of the American people.”