VIDEO: Trump Asked About Paying Off Daniels, Here's What He Had to Say
President Trump recently sat down with Ainsley Earhardt for an interview on “Fox & Friends” where he spoke out about the controversy surrounding a “hush money” payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels and to former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
The president noted that the payments came from him and not from the funds he raised for his presidential campaign.
Asked if he knew about the payments from Cohen to the women alleging past sexual affairs with him, Trump told Earhardt, “Later on I knew.”
Advertisement - story continues below“They weren’t taken out of campaign finance, that’s a big thing,” he said of the payments. “That’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign. They came from me — and I tweeted about it.”
n May, Trump issued a series of tweets on the Daniels’ NDA payment, in which he stressed, “Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction”:
Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA. These agreements are very common among celebrities and people of wealth. In this case it is in full force and effect and will be used in Arbitration for damages against Ms. Clifford (Daniels). The agreement was 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. Prior to its violation by Ms. Clifford and her attorney, this was a private agreement. Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction.
EXCLUSIVE: President @realDonaldTrump on if he knew about the Cohen payments. See more from his interview with @ainsleyearhardt tomorrow 6-9amET. pic.twitter.com/HPJPslOG6X
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) August 22, 2018
Harvard Law Professor Alan Hershowitz agrees. “The president is entitled to pay hush money to anyone he wants during a campaign,” he told MSNBC Wednesday. “There are no restrictions on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. So if, in fact, the president directed Cohen to do it as his lawyer and was going to compensate him for it, the president committed no crime. If Cohen did it on his own then Cohen commits the crime.”
This kind of snafu is precisely why Vice President Pence is an absolute genius for abiding by his rule of never, ever being alone with a woman other than his wife. He will never have to worry about such scandals following him around like shadows for the rest of his political career.
It seems clear that Trump’s association with these less than stellar characters is something that is coming back to haunt him, whether right, wrong, or indifferent.
Hopefully all of the facts will come out surrounding this issue and the whole thing can be put to bed.
It’s a wise rule, despite what you might hear from rabid feminists.
Source: Daily Wire
