Daniels seeks help from Democrat donors
WASHINGTON: Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress who says she had a sexual encounter with President Donald Trump, has sought help for his legal battle against Mr Trump from leading Democratic operatives.
Mr Avenatti contacted an official in the network of liberal groups led by David Brock, while someone associated with Mr Avenatti’s law firm was in touch with two people connected to major Democratic donors, according to people familiar with the conversations. But the discussions do not appear to have led to any financial help for the high-profile legal and public relations fight being waged by Mr Avenatti and Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.
Mr Brock’s groups decided not to donate to the efforts because they saw little value in spending money on a legal fight that was largely being waged in the news media, especially given Mr Avenatti’s penchant for attracting press coverage, according to two Democratic political operatives familiar with the discussions.
It was not clear why the other interactions did not lead to donations or other assistance.
The solicitations call into question Mr Avenatti’s insistence that he and Clifford have never actively sought to raise money from major political donors because “we will not allow this to be politicised.”
In an interview Thursday, Mr Avenatti reiterated that “this isn’t about politics.”
“I can’t tell you the name of every person that I have spoken to, or not spoken to, over the last three months,” he said, “but what I can tell you is that we have not taken any political-associated dollars from anyone on the right or anyone on the left. Period.”
Mr Avenatti, who has become a hero on the left for his brash condemnations of Mr Trump and his allies, has a background on the periphery of Democratic politics. In his website biography, he notes that during college and law school he worked at a political consulting firm run by Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, and boasts that he worked on more than 150 campaigns in 42 states.
Regardless of his intent, Mr Avenatti’s efforts on behalf of Clifford have produced problems for Mr Trump and his allies far beyond her case, which stems from a US$130,000 hush payment she received days before the 2016 presidential election from a Delaware-based company that had just been created by Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s longtime lawyer.
A lawsuit brought in March against Mr Trump and Mr Cohen’s company, Essential Consultants LLC, by Mr Avenatti and Clifford to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement led to the revelation that Mr Trump knew about the payment several months before denying knowledge of it, and also the admission that he had reimbursed Cohen for it, raising questions about campaign finance law compliance. And Mr Avenatti’s release in recent weeks of a detailed report based on financial records that listed payments to Mr Cohen’s firms led to the revelation that he was using his long association with the president to collect millions of dollars in consulting fees from companies with business before the Trump administration.