Experts say feds unlikely to pursue Stormy Daniels payoff
WASHINGTON – A presidential candidate is accused of arranging hush money to conceal a mistress in a sensational story ripped straight from the tabloids. Sound familiar? Six years ago, federal prosecutors put two-time Democratic presidential contender John Edwards on trial for just that and ended up failing to convict the North Carolina politician. Now, the watchdog group Common Cause wants the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission and Congress to investigate a $130,000 payment that President Trump’s lawyer is alleged to have arranged weeks before the 2016 election for a former porn actress in an attempt to cover up her purported affair with Trump.
Campaign finance experts say these cases are tricky, and Washington politics — the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission and Congress all are controlled by the president’s party — seem likely to doom any inquiry into whether federal laws were violated.
“I have real doubts that the Department of Justice has the independence and the fortitude to go after this,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section under George W. Bush.
Attorney General Jeff Session’s decision to recuse himself from a federal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election already has caused a deep rift in his relationship with Trump.
“I think Jeff Sessions is scared to death about losing his job,” Zeidenberg said. “He’s trying to curry favor with the president at every turn, and I think that he would think that this a bridge too far” for his agency to investigate.
In its complaints to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Common Cause argues that the alleged payment to Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, likely violated federal campaign finance laws as an unreported, inkind donation to Trump’s campaign.
Campaign contribution limits in effect during the 2016 election capped direct donations to a candidates at $2,700 for a primary or general election. In addition, corporations are prohibited from giving campaign donations to congressional and presidential candidates.
On Tuesday, Common Cause also asked the House and Senate Judiciary committees to take up the matter.
Justice Department officials did not immediately respond Tuesday to an inquiry about the Common Cause request. An FEC spokesman said agency officials cannot comment on complaints.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer identified by The Wall Street
Journal as having arranged the payment to the actress through a limited liability company, said the complaints lack merit.
“The Common Cause complaint is baseless along with the allegation that President Trump filed a false report to the F.E.C.,” Cohen said in an email.
In an earlier statement, Cohen has said the president “vehemently denies” a relationship with Daniels. Cohen also released a statement from Daniels denying an affair or the receipt of a payoff from Trump.
The Journal unearthed a corporate document showing that Cohen created a limited liability company, Essential Consultants LLC, in Delaware on Oct. 17, 2016, less than a month before the election. A bank account linked to that company sent the payment to the client-trust account of Daniels’ attorney, the newspaper reported. Last week, gossip magazine In
Touch Weekly ran a previously unpublished interview with Daniels from 2011 that described an affair with Trump that began in 2006, a year after he had married Melania Trump.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the alleged payment to Daniels came in October 2016 as Trump’s campaign grappled with release of an Access Hollywood tape in which Trump talked about groping women. Daniels also had been in talks with ABC’s Good
Morning America that fall to discuss Trump, The Journal reported.
“The timing of this payment is strong evidence that this was payment for the purpose of influencing an election” rather than concealing the affair from Trump’s family, said Paul Ryan, Common Cause’s vice president for policy and litigation.
“It was a decade-old relationship he had with her,” Ryan said. “So why then?”
Kenneth Gross, a campaign finance lawyer, said Tuesday: “These are fact-sensitive cases that are tough to prove. You have to get to the bottom of where the money came from and what was the intent of the payment.”
“I have real doubts that the Department of Justice has the independence and the fortitude to go after this.”
Peter Zeidenberg Former prosecutor