Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, once foes, talk Trump
NEW YORK ( AP) — When he was Donald Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen was hellbent on silencing Stormy Daniels, even arranging a hush-money payment to the porn actress that landed him in federal prison.
Now, as one of many of the former president’s insiders- turned- critics, Cohen is literally broadcasting Daniels’ story — including intimate new details of her alleged sexual encounter with Trump — in a discussion ranging from shame and scandal to a haunted house in New Orleans.
Seeking to bury the hatchet, Cohen interviews Daniels in the latest episode of his podcast, “Mea Culpa,” in which the two commiserate over life-altering experiences with Trump and his recent departure from office.
“My battle is just now starting,” Daniels tells Cohen in their first ever conversation, referring to litigation she said had been in a holding pattern before Trump left office. “People are really upset, and they’re just going to get more pissed off at me.”
Cohen, in keeping with the title of his program, apologizes for “the needless pain” he put Daniels through when he arranged a $ 130,000 payment during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about an alleged dalliance with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the affair.
“Both of our stories will be forever linked with Donald Trump, but also with one another,” Cohen tells her. “Thanks for giving me a second chance.”
The scandal turned Stormy Daniels into a household name, and critics accused her of capitalizing on her newfound fame, including crisscrossing the country on a “Make America Horny Again” strip tour.
Federal prosecutors charged Cohen with skirting campaign contribution rules by arranging the hush-money payment to Daniels and a similar payment to Playboy model Karen McDougal. He pleaded guilty to those counts — as well as lying to Congress and tax evasion — and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Cohen has been producing his podcast from his Manhattan apartment, where he is serving the remainder of his sentence after he was released for a second time in July as part of an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 in federal prisons. The podcast is distributed by LiveXLive’s PodcastOne and produced by Audio Up.
Cohen and Daniels are united not only in infamy but deep regret over Trump. Despite the publicity boom — a windfall that included a bestselling book — Daniels said she longs for life before her allegations launched her into the zeitgeist.
“I got to go places I would never get to go,” she tells Cohen. “But overall, if I could just wave a magic wand and make everything go back to the way it was before, I would absolutely do that.”
Daniels said the waning weeks of Trump’s presidency felt like the “eye of the storm.” The death threats — and headlines — had subsided as she remained in a sort of legal limbo.
But now she’s braced for a “second wave” of controversy, including a defamation lawsuit she brought against Trump that she has taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Daniels sued Trump for defamation after the then-president commented on Twitter that a man she said had threatened her was “nonexistent.” She appealed a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case and an order to pay Trump nearly $300,000 in attorneys’ fees.
The lawsuit is among a minefield of legal issues Trump faces after leaving the White House, including state investigations in New York of his business dealings.
“I’ve already lost everything,” she said, referring to her prior way of life, “so I’m taking it all the way.”
Daniels also remains a witness in a federal criminal case against her own former attorney, Michael Avenatti, who is charged with cheating her out of $ 300,000 in proceeds from her 2018 book, “Full Disclosure.” Avenatti has pleaded not guilty.
The hourlong interview also includes graphic descriptions of Daniels’ 2006 sexual encounter with Trump — details she said supports the veracity of her claims. She calls the encounter “the worst 90 seconds of my life, for sure, because it just made me hate myself.”
While she did not feel “physically threatened,” she said she had not expected to have sex with Trump and, at one point, thought about how to escape the room, thinking “I could definitely outrun him.”
She repressed details of the rendezvous for years, she said, adding the dynamics only came into focus after she saw the movie “Bombshell” about the sexual harassment women underwent in meetings with former Fox News executive Roger Ailes.
“I didn’t say anything for years because I didn’t remember,” she said.
HOUSTON ( AP) — For nearly 17 months, the Trump administration tried to deport the mother and daughter from El Salvador. The Biden administration may finish the job.
They are being held at a family detention center in remote Dilley, Texas, but have repeatedly been on the verge of deportation. The Friday before Christmas, both were driven to the San Antonio airport and put on a plane, only to be pulled off when attorneys working for immigrant advocacy groups filed new appeals.
“I have faith first in God and in the new president who has taken office, that he’ll give us a chance,” said the mother, who goes by the nickname “Barbi.” She left behind two other children in El Salvador and asked not to reveal her real name so as not to draw the attention of criminal gangs there.
Barbi’s daughter was 8 when they crossed the U. S. border in August 2019 and will turn 10 in a few weeks. “It’s not been easy,” she said.
It’s unlikely to get easier anytime soon.
President Joe Biden rushed to send the most ambitious overhaul of the nation’s immigration system in a generation to Congress and signed nine executive actions to wipe out some of his predecessor’s toughest measures to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border. But a federal court in Texas suspended his 100-day moratorium on deportations, and the immigration bill is likely to be watered down as lawmakers grapple with major coronavirus pandemic relief bill as well a second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump.
Even if Biden gets most of what he wants on immigration, fully implementing the kind of sweeping changes he’s promised will take weeks, months — perhaps even years. That means, at least for now, there is likely to be more overlap between the Biden and Trump immigration policies than many of the activists who backed the Democrat’s successful campaign had hoped.
“It’s important that we pass policies that are not only transformative, inclusive and permanent but also that they are policies that do not increase the growth of deportation,” said Genesis Renteria, programs director for membership services and engagement at Living United for Change in Arizona, which helped mobilized Democratic voters in a battleground state critical to Biden’s victory.
Federal law allows immigrants facing credible threats of persecution or violence in their home country to seek U.S. asylum. Biden has ordered a review of Trump policies that sent people from Central America, Cuba and other countries to Mexico while their cases were processed — often forcing them into makeshift tent camps mere steps from American soil. He also has formed a task force to reunite immigrant children separated from their parents and halted federal funding to expand walls along the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Saturday, the Biden administration began withdrawing from agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras that restricted the ability of people to seek U.S. asylum.
But those orders likely won’t help Barbi and her daughter. They sought asylum, but were denied because of a Trump administration rule barring such protections for people who crossed other countries to reach the U.S. border. That measure has since been struck down in court.
Still, Barbi and her daughter, like others who have been held for months at Dilley, could be removed from the country at any time.
Advocates who originally commended Biden for championing immigration reform now worry that not enough will be done. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, called it “troubling” that Biden’s efforts “did not include immediate action to rescind and unwind more of the unlawful and inhumane policies that this administration inherited — and now owns.”
Biden administration officials have pleaded for more time, saying Trump’s policies are too wide- reaching to be rescinded overnight. But simply returning to preTrump practices — if Biden is able to actually achieve that — won’t be enough for many activists.
President Barack Obama was called the “deporter- in- chief” for removing a record number of immigrants during his eight years in office. His administration also built the detention center where Barbi is being held, as well as a similar facility in equally rural Karnes City, Texas, 95 miles to
the east.
Biden has banned private prisons, but his order doesn’t apply to lockups like those in Dilley or Karnes City. Far from advocating their closure previously, Biden as vice president Biden flew to Guatemala during a 2014 surge of unaccompanied minors heading to the U.S. border and personally warned that his country would increase detention of families.
Another policy left untouched by Biden dates to March, when Vice President Mike Pence ordered the implementation of emergency health measures that sought to effectively bar immigrants entry into, or impose their speedy removal from, the U.S. to prevent the spread of the virus. Those restrictions have remained despite pending asylum claims and little evidence that sealing borders would curb the pandemic — and 183,000 immigrants have been removed from the U.S. under them since Oct. 1.
A White House spokesperson said the goal was to return the full U.S. asylum process back to a preTrump normal “as much as possible,” but noted that “we are living in the confines of the pandemic.”
Kennji Kizuka, a senior researcher and policy analyst for refugee protection at Human Rights First, said “with people who are in danger, the U. S. has a legal obligation to not return them to a place where they would face persecution, or torture or other harm.”
“That’s not something you can defer because it’s inconvenient in your policy plan,” Kizuka said.
Biden’s pledges to make quick improvements had raised hopes that are now fading along the border. The day before his Jan. 20 inauguration, immigrants staged a protest in the Mexican city of Nogales that ended with them heading to a border crossing into Arizona and asking to be processed for U.S. asylum.
A Customs and Border Protection officer said no but added, “Try again tomorrow.”
They came back the next day — but nothing had changed.
YUMA – U. S. Border Patrol against operating out of the Wellton, Ariz., station arrested the driver of a semi-truck who had eight undocumented migrants hidden within the cabin area of the vehicle, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection release.
On Thursday evening about 5 p.m., Arizona Department of Public Safety officials requested Border Patrol assistance on a vehicle stop just east of the Ligurta Rest Area on Interstate 8 eastbound lanes.
Agents conducted immigration inspections of the occupants and discovered seven Mexican nationals and a Honduran national without proper paperwork. Records checks on the eight adult males revealed that one is a convicted felon who previously served 18 months in prison for possession of a controlled substance, the
CBP release said.
The male driver of the semi, a 43- year- old U. S. citizen without a commercial driver’s license,
was booked on smuggling charges. The vehicle was seized, and the eight passengers are being held as material witnesses.