Disclosure puts filing in doubt
Document says Trump paid Cohen $100K in 2017; sum omitted in previous statement
President Donald Trump’s financial disclosure form, released on Wednesday, included for the first time mention of a repayment of more than $100,000 to his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in 2017, raising questions about whether Trump’s sworn filing from a year ago improperly omitted the debt.
In a highly unusual letter, the Office of Government Ethics alerted the Justice Department on Wednesday to the omission, telling Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, that the ethics office had determined “the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported as a liability.”
Trump’s financial disclosure, released by the Office of Government Ethics, did not specify the purpose of the payment. However, Cohen has paid $130,000 to a pornographic film actress, Stephanie Clifford, who has said she had an affair with Trump. Cohen has said he made the payment shortly before the 2016 election as hush money for Clifford.
Trump repaid Cohen $100,001 to $250,000 in 2017, according to a footnote in the filing.
David Apol, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, sent Rosenstein a copy of Trump’s current and previous financial form, noting in his letter that “you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing regarding the president’s prior report that was signed on June 14, 2017.”
The letter is not an official referral and does not constitute a finding of wrongdoing, according
to lawyers.
The hush payment has been a source of controversy for Trump, who initially said on Air Force One that he was unaware of the payment to Clifford before acknowledging its existence in a series of Twitter posts this month. Trump said that he repaid a $130,000 payment Cohen made to Clifford days before the 2016 presidential election and suggested that the payment by Cohen could not be considered a campaign contribution.
Trump’s lawyers, who prepared the document that was released on Wednesday, said that Trump was reporting the repaid debt “in the interest of transparency” but declared in the footnote that the transaction was “not required to be disclosed as reportable liabilities.”
Critics of Trump seized on the repaid debt as proof that the president should have included it in last year’s statement, which was filed voluntarily in June and signed by Trump under a line that said, “I certify that the statements I have made in this report are true, complete and correct to
the best of my knowledge.”
Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that the inclusion of the payment on this year’s form “raises serious questions as to why it was not disclosed in last year’s filing.” The group, known as CREW, had filed a complaint with the Justice Department and the ethics office asking for an investigation into whether the payment constituted a loan.
Under federal law, an official who “knowingly and willfully falsifies information” on a financial disclosure could face criminal charges.
Trump’s disclosure of the repaid debt to Cohen did little to clear up confusion about the total size of the reimbursements. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, said this month that Cohen was paid $460,000 or $470,000 from Trump, which also included money for “incidental expenses” that incurred on Trump’s behalf.
Giuliani said that Trump started paying Cohen back through a series of monthly installments of about $35,000 and that those payments began last year. The filing released on Wednesday capped the amount Trump paid back in 2017 at $250,000, leaving more than $200,000 unaccounted for.
The disclosure did not preclude the possibility that federal investigators could determine the payment to Clifford violated campaign finance laws. If they concluded it was made with the intention of influencing the presidential campaign, it would violate election law, which caps individual donations to federal candidates at $5,400 per election cycle.
Candidates are allowed to spend as much as they want on their own campaigns. And, according to the filing, Trump paid Cohen back, making Cohen’s initial payment a loan. But campaign finance law treats personal loans as contributions and the $5,400 limit would have applied. Public campaign filings are also supposed to account for all loans, contributions and payments; Trump’s made no mention of the Cohen arrangement.
Giuliani has argued that Cohen made the payment to Clifford on Trump’s behalf for personal reasons unrelated to the campaign and should not, therefore, be counted as a campaign expense subject to election law. This new disclosure could help bolster that argument by Trump.
Beyond the repaid debt to Cohen, the 92-page form provides the most detailed window into how Trump’s finances have fared during his presidency.
The document, which covers the 2017 calendar year, showed total income from Trump’s business operations and investments of at least $453 million and assets valued at a minimum of $1.4 billion. The disclosure from the previous year showed total income of at least $597 million and a similar level of assets, but that report spanned nearly 16 months so is not directly comparable.