Giuliani: Trump repaid Cohen $130,000 for Stormy Daniels hush agreement – By Rebecca Morin, Michael Crowley & Josh Gerstein (politico.com) / May 2 2018
But he emphasized the payment did not involve campaign funds.
Rudy Giuliani said on Wednesday evening that President Donald Trump reimbursed his personal lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment Cohen had made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels, contradicting the president’s account of what he knew of the arrangement for keeping her silent about an affair she says she had with Trump.
“I’m giving you a fact that you don’t know,” Giuliani, the former New York mayor who recently joined the president’s legal team, told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation. They funneled through a law firm and the president repaid it.”
That seemed to contradict Trump’s public statements on the payment, which has become a subject of a criminal investigation into Cohen, whose residences and office were raided by the FBI last month.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One in early April, Trump replied, “No,” when asked, “Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?”
The details of the payment, and whether and when Trump knew about it, have important legal implications. A payment intended to protect his campaign from political damage could be a violation of campaign finance law. As a candidate, Trump was permitted to spend an unlimited amount of his own funds on his campaign, but such sums should have been reported to the Federal Election Commission.
Cohen has also insisted that he used his own money and was not reimbursed for the payment by the Trump campaign or the Trump Organization. Cohen has never publicly said whether Trump paid him back for the money shelled out to Daniels.
In his Fox interview, Giuliani went on to say that Trump “didn’t know about the specifics about it, as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangements.” The former prosecutor and mayor indicated that Trump reimbursed Cohen through a series of payments of about $35,000, with some extra funds added to cover taxes and perhaps other services rendered. Reports indicated Cohen may have been paid as much as $460,000.
Giuliani’s emphasis that the payment did not involve campaign funds seemed to be an attempt to preserve the legal argument that the money was paid for personal reasons unrelated to the campaign.
Trump’s statement last month that he did not know about the payment is likely to be closely scrutinized by investigators, although neither the reporter asking the question nor Trump clarified just when he learned about the payment. Prosecutors sometimes cite false public statements as part of an attempt to obstruct justice by confusing investigators.
In a separate interview later Wednesday, Giuliani insisted his disclosure about Trump’s reimbursement of Cohen was no gaffe and that it was discussed with Trump in advance.
“He was well-aware that at some point when I saw the opportunity, I was going to get this over with,” Giuliani told the Washington Post, adding that he discussed the issue with the president “probably 4 or 5 days ago.” The former U.S. attorney said he didn’t think he was at risk of being fired over his comments.
“No! No! No! I’m not going to get fired,” Giuliani told the Post. “But if I do, I do. It wouldn’t be the first time it ever happened. But I don’t think so, no.”
Giuliani’s comments suggested that federal prosecutors in New York who are investigating Cohen were likely already aware of the repayment from Trump, and that Trump’s involvement was likely to become public at some point anyway.
Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Trump and Cohen over a hush agreement that she argues is not binding because Trump never signed it. The president has denied having an affair with Daniels.
Daniels on Monday filed another lawsuit against Trump accusing him of defamation for an April 19 Twitter posting in which he suggested that she had fabricated story about being threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011 by a man who told her: “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.”
“I am absolutely speechless at this revelation,” Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ lawyer, said in a phone interview late Wednesday on MSNBC. “I hope that your viewers and I hope that the American people upon hearing this and watching that clip, they should be outraged.”
Avenatti went on to say that Americans “deserve to be told the truth by your president and the people that stand at the podium at the White House … briefing press conference.”
“The American people have been lied to about this agreement, about the $130,000, about the reimbursement, and this is consistent about what we have been saying now for months, that was ultimately going to be proven and ultimately going to come out,” he said. “We just didn’t know that Rudy Giuliani was going to go on the Sean Hannity show and admit it on national television.”
Trump critics said Giuliani’s acknowledgment of the president’s role put the president in further legal jeopardy.
“Rudy Giuliani tonight put President Trump in legal peril for ‘knowing and willful’ violations of campaign finance law,” said Paul Ryan of the Campaign Legal Center, a group which filed formal complaints about the episode with the FEC and the Justice Department. “Giuliani seemingly thought he was doing President Trump a favor — but instead made Trump’s legal problems much, much worse. … Trump’s own lawyer has now handed the DOJ evidence that President Trump committed criminal violations of federal law.”
Giuliani also said, after being asked by Hannity to clarify, that the “money that was paid by his lawyer, the president reimbursed that over the period of several months.”
Hannity pressed Giuliani, saying that Cohen said he paid the money on his own without being asked.
“I don’t know,” Giuliani replied. “I haven’t investigated that, no reason to dispute that, no reason to dispute his recollection.”
Revelations about Daniels and Trump’s involvement was not the only thing Giuliani revealed Wednesday evening to Hannity.
In the same wide-ranging interview, Giuliani also railed at length against the federal investigation into Russian election influence, which has focused in part on whether Trump himself might have colluded with the Kremlin or sought to obstruct justice after the investigation was launched.
“This is a completely tainted investigation,” Giuliani told Hannity.
He also delivered harsh attacks on former FBI Director James Comey, who he said he believed to be the “core” of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the president. Trump fired Comey in May 2017, an act that many experts say could be interpreted as an effort to obstruct justice.
“I know James Comey. I know the president. Sorry, Jim, you’re a liar, a disgraceful liar,” Giuliani said. “Every FBI agent in America has their head down because of you.”
Giuliani repeatedly said he intended to be “objective” toward his approach to Mueller’s request for an interview with Trump. He said that he probably wouldn’t under today’s circumstances, but that he hadn’t totally closed his mind to it. But he peppered his remarks with bruising attacks on the special counsel’s investigation.
“You can’t possibly not feel as a citizen of the world that [the president’s] negotiations with North Korea are much more significant than this totally garbage investigation,” he said, calling the process “an outrageous miscarriage of justice.”
Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/02/giuliani-trump-cohen-stormy-daniels-566029
