Giuliani may have Trump in legal hot water
Stories keep changing on Stormy Daniels payoff
WASHINGTON – President Trump and his new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, may have exposed the president to legal risk by acknowledging that Trump reimbursed his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen for the $130,000 that was used to silence porn star Stormy Daniels, campaign finance watchdogs said Thursday.
If Trump knew about Cohen’s payment to Daniels but didn’t disclose it as a loan on his campaign’s filings with the Federal Election Commission, that could amount to a “knowing and willful” violation of election law and a criminal statute that prohibits making false statements to the government, said Paul Ryan, a top lawyer with Common Cause, a non-partisan watchdog group that has sought federal investigations into the payoff.
“I think it’s quite likely that (Giuliani) had no idea he was further digging the hole for the president.”
Richard Hasen Expert on election law, University of California-Irvine
A key factor in deciding whether Trump’s reimbursement violates campaign laws turns on whether the payment — made just 11 days before the 2016 presidential campaign — was intended to help Trump win the election.
In a series of tweets Thursday morning, Trump confirmed that he had reimbursed Cohen, contradicting his statement last month to reporters on Air Force One that he did not know about the payment.
The president also tweeted that the payment “had nothing to do with the campaign.”
But minutes later on Fox & Friends, Giuliani appeared to contradict Trump by directly linking the payoff to the election’s outcome.
“Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani said. “Cohen didn’t even ask. Cohen made it go away.”
Richard Hasen, an expert on election law at the University of California-Irvine, said Giuliani may have unwittingly caused more legal headaches for Trump.
“If that reflects Trump’s motive, this is a very damning statement,” he said.
“I think it’s quite likely that (Giuliani) had no idea he was further digging the hole for the president,” Hasen said. “Either Trump is a liar or he has incompetent counsel or potentially both.”
Later, in an appearance on Fox Business Network, Giuliani appeared to retreat from his earlier remarks, saying: “This was about personal reputation. The money wasn’t paid to help the campaign or hurt the campaign.”
The changing accounts of what the president knew and did about the payment to the adult film actress have transfixed Washington since Giuliani’s interview Wednesday night on Fox News, acknowledging for the first time that Trump had repaid Cohen.
In interviews, Giuliani indicated that Trump had reimbursed Cohen through a series of monthly retainer payments, possibly in 2017 or 2018.
At the White House, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders faced repeated questions Thursday about why Trump had said as recently as a month ago that he was unaware of Cohen’s payment to Daniels.
“This was information that the president didn’t know at the time but eventually learned,” Sanders told reporters.
In an interview late Thursday afternoon with USA TODAY, Giuliani repeated his assertion that the payoff was a personal matter. “No one ever thought of it as a campaign violation,” he said.
Bradley Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman, said regulators have set a high standard for proving potential violations. To find a violation of federal election laws, Smith said, the commissioners need strong evidence that keeping the Daniels’ story from voters “was the motivation” for the payment, “not a motivation.”
The revelations about Trump reimbursing Cohen come as Trump and his allies face several legal threats, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s suspected interference in the 2016 election. Last month, FBI agents raided Cohen’s home and offices as part of a criminal investigation in New York into the longtime Trump lawyer and fixer.
In California, meanwhile, Daniels is waging a battle against Cohen and Trump to invalidate her agreement to keep quiet about the tryst she said she had 12 years ago with the future president. Last week, a federal judge ordered a 90-day delay in Daniels’ civil lawsuit, citing a likely indictment against Cohen in New York.
There’s no precedent for the indictment of a sitting president, and legal scholars are divided on the question of whether Mueller even has the authority to take a far less drastic step and subpoena Trump as part of the Russia investigation.
“I don’t expect that Donald Trump will go to jail over this violation,” Hasen said. But he said a charge that Trump violated campaign finance laws could become part of an impeachment proceeding should the House pursue that action.