TRUMP’S DEFENSE: ‘ADVICE OF COUNSEL’
Responding to accusations he broke law, prez says he was following bad advice from lawyer
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump offered a simple defense Thursday to accusations he broke campaign finance law by directing attorney Michael Cohen to orchestrate hushmoney payments to conceal Trump’s alleged affairs: He was following terrible advice from a bad lawyer.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’” Trump wrote on Twitter.
The advice-of-counsel defense is a real thing. But Trump’s ability to use it, if he were ever formally accused of a crime, is far from certain.
“People talk about advice-of-counsel as a defense more than it’s actually asserted, and it’s rarely successful,” said Dane Ciolino, a constitutional law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
Courts have held that the defense applies when a person has gone to a lawyer to ask about whether something is legal, disclosed all material facts, and then relied in good faith on the professional’s advice that no laws were being broken.
The illegal act in this case involves payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal to keep them from talking about sexual encounters they say they had with Trump.
Federal prosecutors in New York say the payments amounted to illegal campaign contributions because they were made at the height of the 2016 election season to keep voters from learning of Trump’s alleged infidelities. Cohen was sentenced Wednesday to three years in prison for the violations and other crimes.
Cohen, Trump and David Pecker, the chairman of the company that owns the National Enquirer, had a meeting at Trump Tower in August of 2015 to discuss ways the company could help the campaign, including buying the silence of women who might talk publicly about affairs with Trump, according to documents made public by federal prosecutors.
Trump has not specified what advice, if any, he received from Cohen. In an interview Thursday with Fox News, he said: “I never directed him to do anything wrong. Whatever he did he did on his own.”