Filing: Hush-money deal invalid
President withdraws threats to sue Daniels, his attorney says
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump does not believe porn actress Stormy Daniels’ hush-money deal, which his former personal lawyer said was done to influence the 2016 presidential election, is valid and will not carry out threats to sue her for breaking the agreement by discussing details of their alleged affair, Trump’s attorney said in a court filing Saturday.
Hours earlier, an attorney for the company set up to handle the deal offered to rescind Daniels’ nondisclosure agreement. The company, Essential Consultants, also scrapped a threatened $20 million lawsuit against Daniels.
In a letter dated Friday, ex-Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Brent Blakely, wrote to Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, saying that Cohen had agreed “to accept the rescission” of the deal, which was reached in October 2016, a month before the presidential election.
Under the terms of the arrangement, Essential Consultants LLC, a shell company Cohen created, paid Daniels $130,000 not to speak publicly about a sexual relationship she said she began with Trump in 2006 after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada.
Shortly after the letter was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Avenatti accused Cohen on Twitter of “playing games and trying to protect Donald Trump.”
Cohen is “now pulling a legal stunt to try and ‘fix it’ so that we can’t depose Trump and present evidence to the American people about what happened,” Avenatti said.
Blakely, who is based in Los Angeles, did not immediately respond to efforts to reach him, but in an interview Saturday morning, Avenatti insisted that the offer was “dead on arrival.”
Avenatti added that he would accept the offer only if both Cohen and Trump acknowledged that the nondisclosure deal was illegal from the start because it violated federal campaign finance laws.
Last month, Cohen admitted to precisely that, acknowledging in a guilty plea in a Manhattan federal courtroom that he had broken campaign finance laws in structuring the deal with Clifford. In his plea, Cohen said he had struck the arrangement not only at Trump’s request but also to influence the election.
The offers would remove any legal risk to Daniels stemming from her public discussion of the alleged affair and the alleged efforts to hide it. But if a court were to find that the proposal resolved the underlying controversy in her litigation with Cohen, the development could kill efforts by Avenatti to try to compel the president to give sworn testimony.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said she had sex once with Trump in 2006 and carried on a platonic relationship with him for about a year. She was paid $130,000 as part of the agreement signed days before the 2016 election and is suing to dissolve the contract. Daniels has argued the agreement should be invalidated because Cohen signed it, but Trump did not.
In Saturday’s court filing, Trump’s attorney, Charles Harder, said the president doesn’t dispute Daniels’ assertion that the contract isn’t valid and never considered himself as a party to the agreement. Both Trump and Cohen have asked Daniels to now drop her lawsuit.
In addition to the offer to quash the agreement, Essential Consultants also agreed to back off its plan to fight Daniels in private arbitration and will not pursue a lawsuit against her, Blakely said in the letter to Daniels’ lawyer. Cohen had said that Daniels could owe $20 million for violating the agreement.
The company wants Daniels to repay the $130,000 she was paid, Blakely wrote.
Avenatti told The Associated Press that he did not have to accept the offer and would not settle the case without deposing Trump and Cohen. He said he was still reviewing his options but wasn’t worried about the developments.
Avenatti said he thought Harder’s court filing was “worthless,” had “numerous problems” and “means nothing.”
“We are tired of the constant delays and games being played,” he said. “We want these depositions as soon as possible.”
Regardless of how a court views the offer by Trump and Cohen’s company to drop efforts to enforce the agreement, Avenatti has other possible legal routes to pursue the president. Daniels is also suing Trump and Cohen for defamation.