White House: Trump thinks Stormy Daniels lied about threat
WASHINGTON » The White House on Monday said President Donald Trump has consistently denied the allegations leveled by porn star Stormy Daniels in her “60 Minutes” interview, and said Trump does not believe her claim that she was threatened to stay quiet over their alleged affair.
White House spokesman Raj Shah declined to say whether the president had actually watched the Sunday broadcast. But he nonetheless said Trump does not believe “any of the claims that Ms. Daniels made last night in the interview are accurate.”
“The president strongly, clearly and has consistently denied these underlying claims, and the only person who’s been inconsistent is the one making the claims,” he said.
In the interview, Daniels said she’d slept with Trump once, shortly after nowfirst lady Melania Trump gave birth to the president’s youngest son. She also said that a man approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011, when she was with her infant daughter, and threatened her with physical harm if she went public with her story.
In a letter late Sunday night, an attorney for Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, demanded that Daniels publicly apologize to his client for suggesting he was involved in her intimidation.
“In truth, Mr. Cohen had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any such person or incident, and does not even believe that any such person exists, or that such incident ever occurred,” wrote Brent H. Blakely. He said Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, should “cease and desist from making any further false and defamatory statements about my client.”
Daniels, in response, filed a revised federal lawsuit accusing Cohen of defamation. The suit now alleges Cohen made a false statement that damaged Daniels’ reputation when he released a statement in February that intimated she was lying.
Daniels told “60 Minutes” she had consensual sex once with the future president, providing a few salacious details but little new evidence of the encounter.
Still, she said that she’d been rattled by the parking lot incident in which she a man had told her to “leave Trump alone” and “forget the story.” She said the man looked over at her daughter, and said: “That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
In a round of television interviews Monday morning, Avenatti said he was holding back certain details of the alleged affair, including the contents of a CD or DVD he tweeted a picture of last week, for strategic reasons. “It would make no sense for us to play our hand as to this issue and we’re not going to do it right now,” he said on NBC’s “Today” show.
Daniels received a $130,000 payment days before the 2016 presidential election for her silence and has sought to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement she signed. Cohen has said he paid the $130,000 out of his pocket while asserting Trump never had sex with the porn actress.
“He knows I’m telling the truth,” Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, said of Trump. She said she was not coerced to have sex and “I was not a victim.”
Previously, Cohen has said neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Daniels and he was not reimbursed for the payment.
During Monday’s briefing, Shah said neither the White House nor Trump had violated campaign finance laws that restrict political contributions.
“The White House didn’t engage in any wrongdoing,” Shah said of Trump’s behavior, adding that there was “nothing to corroborate” Daniels’ intimidation claims.