Trump would pay for more women’s silence says Giuliani
DONALD TRUMP would have paid other women who came forward claiming affairs with the US president, “if necessary”, Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer, said yesterday.
The former New York mayor was speaking in response to the furore surrounding a payment of $130,000 (£96,000) to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, made by Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer.
The sum was paid along with a nondisclosure agreement intended to prevent her talking about an alleged tryst with the president.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, sued Mr Trump in March to get out of the “hush agreement” When asked on This Week, the ABC current affairs show, whether Mr Giuliani has knowledge of any other women being paid, he said: “I have no knowledge of that. But I would think if it was necessary, yes.”
He made the comments days after a report in The Wall Street Journal detailed the existence of a possible “slush fund” used by Mr Cohen to settle problems during Mr Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
According to the report, Mr Cohen had access to as much as $774,000 (£572,000) from credit lines tied to his family properties.
The White House has sought unsuccessfully to quell the growing scandal around the payments.
Last week, Mr Giuliani claimed that Mr Trump had reimbursed Mr Cohen for the money, in contradiction to the president’s earlier comments that he knew nothing about the payments.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s lawyer, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’S This Week Mr Giuliani’s remarks were “an absolute unmitigated disaster”.
In a surprise cameo appearance on a Trump sketch on Saturday Night Live, the NBC show, Daniels called on the president to resign and told Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump: “A storm’s a-coming, baby.”