Tag: Dirty Trump

Apparently Trump and Giuliani are so pleased with the way Giuliani’s conversation with Hannity went that they decided to do even more like that.

Rudy Giuliani, who joined President Trump’s personal legal team last week, told Fox News on Thursday that the Trump attorney Michael Cohen had arranged a payment to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in order to prevent allegations of an affair from coming out in the closing days of the 2016 election.

The former New York City mayor’s explanation for the $130,000 payment to Daniels suggests the deal likely ran afoul of campaign-finance laws.

…

On Thursday morning, Trump tweeted that Cohen “received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign … used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair.”

“Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll [sic] in this transaction,” the president insisted.

But Giuliani quickly contradicted that explanation in an interview with Fox and Friends Thursday morning, indicating that the payment to Daniels was meant to prevent damaging information from emerging in the latter days of the 2016 campaign. “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani said. “Cohen didn’t even ask. He made it go away. He did his job.”

That statement, legal experts said, appears to confirm that the payment was a campaign expenditure. “This is good circumstantial evidence this was campaign-related,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Giuliani did Trump no favors.”

No, it’s all part of their cunning plan.

Along with the hush money part there’s the obstruction of justice part.

Giuliani conceded in an offhand way that Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey because Comey failed to do Trump’s bidding and publicly declare that Trump was not under investigation. Here’s what Giuliani said:

“He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Giuliani said. “He’s entitled to that. Hillary Clinton got that, and he couldn’t get that. So he fired him, and he said, ‘I’m free of this guy.’”

In saying this, Giuliani appears to have thought that he was exonerating Trump. Giuliani was saying Trump didn’t fire Comey to obstruct the investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russian sabotage of our election, but rather because Comey didn’t publicly clear him, which Giuliani believes Trump was “entitled to.”

I stared in astonishment at that clip last night, because it’s so ridiculous. Giuliani was a prosecutor once upon a time, and here he is announcing that powerful people are “entitled” to order investigators to clear them during an investigation. What entitlement is that? Who has ever heard of such an entitlement before? Trump’s ordering Comey to publicly clear him is obstructing the investigation. Hillary Clinton did not “get that” until Comey and the FBI had closed the investigation.

“It seems that Giuliani is trying to suggest that Trump did not obstruct justice when he fired Comey,” Barbara McQuade, a former prosecutor and current law professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “But in fact he may just be building the case against him. Even demanding that Comey make a public statement that Trump is not under investigation would itself potentially be obstruction of justice.” McQuade added that insisting on such a public statement constitutes “interfering in the investigation.”

It seems to me blindingly obvious that it does; how could it not?

We also know that Mueller is looking at all of this conduct. To establish obstruction, Mueller needs to show that in trying to hamstring or derail the probe, Trump acted with “corrupt intent,” say, to protect himself and his top officials from scrutiny. The leaked questions from Mueller show that he wants to ask Trump about that very same March 30 call with Comey in which he seems to have demanded that Comey publicly exonerate him. Mueller wants to probe Trump’s state of mind about all of this, including whether Comey’s public confirmation of the investigation — which angered Trump — helped precipitate Comey’s firing.

Giuliani has now publicly confirmed that all that did indeed figure into Trump’s rationale. And Mueller’s team may take an interest in this, McQuade told me: “This will cause them to review what they’ve done already and will inform their questions going forward.”

To be clear, it still remains very unlikely that Mueller will try to indict Trump for obstruction of justice. But Mueller is expected to produce a report on the obstruction question, and his findings on it may be made public in some form. Whether or not Trump can be held criminally liable for obstruction, Mueller may end up documenting a pattern of very serious misconduct, which could shed new light on just how far Trump went to shield himself and his cronies from accountability, something that could have serious implications for our politics and for our efforts to restore the integrity of the rule of law amid Trump’s nonstop degradation of it.

Maybe that’s our future – clear public knowledge that Trump obstructed justice to serve his own interests, and we remain stuck with him.

So that was a big oops – Rudy Giuliani telling Sean Hannity that Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen for that $130k Cohen paid Stormy Daniels – and that he did it by “funneling” it through a law firm. Lawyers were all but cackling as they explained that “funneling” amounts to “structuring” and the latter is a felony.

President Trump reimbursed Michael D. Cohen, his longtime personal lawyer, for a $130,000 payment that Mr. Cohen has said he made to keep a pornographic film actress from going public before the 2016 election with her story about an affair with Mr. Trump, according to Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s lawyers.

Those four words before the 2016 election are crucial, because they’re what makes it a campaign contribution and thus subject to laws that appear to have been broken if not smashed and trampled underfoot.

That statement, which Mr. Giuliani made Wednesday night on Fox News, contradicted the president, who has said he had no knowledge about any payment to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, to keep quiet before the election.

Asked specifically last month by reporters aboard Air Force One whether he knew about the payment, Mr. Trump said, “No,” and referred questions to Mr. Cohen. He was then asked, “Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?”

“No,” Mr. Trump responded. “I don’t know.”

Michael Avenatti was doing headstands.

Giuliani says his goal was to establish that Trump himself paid off Stephanie Clifford, so there was no campaign finance violation…but then there is a lot of other stuff, like for instance that bald lie told on camera on Air Force One.

The president has repeatedly denied that he had an affair with Ms. Clifford, who has described having intimate contact with Mr. Trump before he became president.

Mr. Giuliani’s comments are also in direct contrast to what Mr. Cohen has been saying for months — that he used his own money to pay Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. Mr. Cohen is under investigation by the F.B.I., which raided his home and office last month and seized documents that included information about the payment to Ms. Clifford.

The things we’re talking about now thanks to the election of this squalid turd of a man.

The comments on Fox sent a jolt through Washington and New York, including the legal teams working on behalf of the president, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Clifford, who has sued Mr. Cohen in an attempt to be released from the nondisclosure agreement that accompanied the $130,000 payment in October 2016.

Michael Avenatti, Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, said Wednesday night on Twitter that Mr. Giuliani’s comments amounted to an admission that the president had lied to the American people about whether he was aware of the hush payment.

“Mr. Trump stood on AF1 and blatantly lied,” Mr. Avenatti wrote. “This followed the lies told by others close to him, including Mr. Cohen. This should never be acceptable in our America. We will not rest until justice is served.”

No, it should not. Trump’s constant shameless lying is totally unacceptable and always has been.

Mr. Trump’s campaign did not disclose the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen on its commission reports.

The crucial question in determining whether the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance laws might be whether the payment was specifically intended to help Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Paul S. Ryan, an official at the government watchdog group Common Cause, argued that “all the facts indicate that the payment was to influence the election.”

Mr. Ryan asserted that Mr. Giuliani’s admission could allow prosecutors to make the case that Mr. Trump “knowingly caused his campaign committee to file an incomplete disclosure report with the F.E.C.”

“Until tonight, it would have been tough to prove that because Donald Trump had denied knowing about the payment,” Mr. Ryan said. “But his reimbursement amounts to knowledge.”

So Giuliani solved one legal problem but made another much worse. That’s probably inevitable with a client like Trump.