Trump may face legal peril over porn star

WASHINGTON – The salacious details of Stormy Daniels’ alleged affair with Donald Trump more than a decade ago have seeped out to the public, but the porn star has been barred from telling the story herself.

That might soon change, according to legal experts, despite a temporary restraining order the president’s legal team won last week against Daniels, who is fighting in court to tell her story.

A legal document called a “hush agreement” that she said she signed weeks before the 2016 presidential election keeps her from dishing on Trump, but it could paint the president in a corner, said Imre Szalai, a national expert on arbitration law with the Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans.

Trump’s legal team can try to keep Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, silent through arbitration.

If the president admits being a party to an agreement that paid Daniels to stay quiet, the Federal Election Commission would probably view it as a violation of campaign finance law, Szalai wrote on his Outsourcing Justice blog.

If Trump doesn’t contest Daniels’ ability to go public, she could embarrass the president.

“If the hush payment violated election law, then this lawsuit and the procedural dilemmas concerning the enforcement of the arbitration agreement have placed Trump in a Catch-22 situation if he or the company seeks to compel arbitration,” Szalai wrote.

That might draw the interest of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether there were links between the Trump campaign and Russians allegedly trying to influence the 2016 election, said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “This is well within Mueller’s wheelhouse,” he said. “Mueller could seek answers about the payment.”