On Tuesday evening President, Trump's personal attorney Michael D. Cohen, told the New York Times that he paid $130,000 to porn star Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. "Stormy Daniels) out of his own pocket, and that neither the Trump Organization or the Trump Campaign had anything to do with the 2016 transaction.
Michael D. Cohen, "Stormy Daniels"
“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen told The New York Times. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone."
The statement was prompted by the ongoing media allegations that Trump misused campaign funds to keep the porn star's mouth shut: campaign finance advocacy group, Common Cause, had complained about the payment to the Federal Election Commission, which was investigating. As such Cohen was simply "taking one for the team."
Unfortunately for Trump, Cohen's intervention appears to have had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended as Daniels, the porn star at the center of the scandal, believes she is now free to discuss her alleged sexual encounter with Trump, her manager told The Associated Press Wednesday.
According to her manager, Gina Rodriguez, the porn star "believes that Trump attorney Michael Cohen invalidated a non-disclosure agreement after two news stories were published Tuesday: One, in which Cohen told The New York Times that he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and another in the Daily Beast, which reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story", said the manager,
"Everything is off now, and Stormy is going to tell her story," the manager said.
At issue is what transpired inside a Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room in 2006 between the actress and Trump the year after his marriage to his third wife, Melania.
A lawyer for Daniels, Keith Davidson, has previously distributed statements on Daniels’ behalf denying there was any affair. But in a 2011 interview with the gossip magazine In Touch Weekly, the actress — who the magazine said passed a polygraph exam — said the two had sex and she described a subsequent yearslong relationship. The AP previously reported that In Touch held off on publishing her account after Cohen threatened to sue the publication. It published the interview last month.
In the 2011 In Touch interview, Daniels first detailed her consensual affair which happened in 2006, which she claims happened shortly after Trump's youngest son, Barron, was born.
Stormy (given name: Stephanie Clifford) confirms in her own words that she had sex with Donald Trump in his Lake Tahoe, NV, hotel suite in 2006 — a story that was corroborated to In Touch in 2011 by her good friend Randy Spears and supported by her ex-husband Mike Moz. Stormy also took and passed a polygraph test at the time of the interview.
Stormy told In Touch, “[The sex] was textbook generic,” while discussing the fling they had less than four months after Donald’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. “I actually don’t even know why I did it, but I do remember while we were having sex, I was like, ‘Please, don’t try to pay me.’” -In Touch
The website then removed the material under the threat of a lawsuit, according to the site’s founder, Nik Richie.
Daniel's story then went dormant and largely out of public view until a month before the 2016 presidential election, when the website The Smoking Gun published an account that went mostly unnoticed by major news organizations.
In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that a limited liability company in Delaware formed by Cohen made the six-figure payment to Daniels to keep her from discussing the affair during the presidential campaign. Then yesterday, Cohen said the payment was made with his own money, and that Trump was neither aware of it, nor reimbursed it.
In recent weeks the actress has played coy, declining to elaborate when pressed on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
And now that Cohen has infuriated Daniels with his latest disclosure, and reportedly broken the NDA, it is only a matter of time before this particular Trump scandal becomes the media's latest obsession.
Rodriguez said her client will soon announce how and when she will tell her story publicly although some have suggested that she will first entertain one (or more) cash "offers" from Michael Cohen to keep her mouth shut, again... without Trump's knowledge of course.