Trump implicated in hush money payouts
WASHINGTON: US prosecutors have i mplicated President Donald Trump in the payment of hush money to women who had claimed to have had extramarital affairs with him, in court filings on Friday.
The prosecutors said Trump had directed and coordinated the payments.
They also revealed a previously unreported attempt by Russians to help Trump in his run for the White House, dating back to November 2015.
These court filings were submitted separately by the US attorney for the southern district of New York and the office of special counsel Robert Mueller in connection with the sentencing of Michael Cohen.
Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, has pleaded guilty to misleading financial institutions, violating election funding laws and lying to US congress.
The prosecutors in New York recommended “substantial” prison time for Cohen, arguing that his crimes were motivated by “personal greed”.
However, they conceded that Cohen deserves some credit for cooperating with the investigators, which was acknowledged by Mueller’s prosecutors, and indicated a moderated term of three and a half years would be appropriate.
In a Washington court, prosecutors for Mueller argued that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, had lied in violation of his plea deal on several key issues, and had been in touch with a man who is said to have ties to Russian intelligence.
Trump sought to spin these filings as vindication for him - “Totally clears the President. Thank you!” he wrote on Twitter - as the court filing by the New York prosecutors had implicated him in the planning of the hush money payments.
“As Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” the sentencing memo said, about payments made to Karen Mcdougal, a former model, and Stormy Daniels, an adult actress, over their accounts about “extramarital affairs” with Trump.
“Individual-1” is a reference to Trump, which is clear from multiple references.
The filing refers to a meeting that Cohen and Trump had with the publisher of a magazine in 2014 at which the publisher “had offered to help deal with negative stories about Individual-1’s relationships with women by identifying such stories so that they could be purchased and ‘killed’”.
Mcdougal was paid $150,000 by the publication for her story that never ran - in a practice that’s called “catch and kill” - and Daniels (who is legally known as Stephanie Cliffords) was paid $130,000, which Cohen paid and sought reimbursement after the polls as “election-related expenses”.
The revelation about a new meeting with Russians came in the sentencing memo filed by Mueller’s prosecutors. It says Cohen lied to congress when testifying about a Trump project that he had pursed for the Trump Organization in Moscow and for which he had been in touch with officials close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Cohen had earlier claimed that discussions about the project had stopped in January 2016, when, in fact, he has since said that talks went on for six months more - and by then, Trump had clinched the Republican nomination.
The new filings, however, did not answer the core question of Muller’s probe - if the president colluded with Russia.
Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday, saying, “AFTER TWO YEARS AND MILLIONS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS (and a cost of over $30,000,000), NO COLLUSION!”