Storm Watch: the latest developments in the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump saga

“Summer Zervos is one of many women who has been subjected to unwanted sexual touching by Donald J. Trump.”

So begins the defamation lawsuit filed by Zervos, a restaurant owner and former contestant on The Apprentice, who says Trump sexually assaulted her in 2007 and then called her a liar when she spoke out about it in 2016.

Michael Avenatti, the attorney for porn actress Stormy Daniels who became a political celebrity and potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has been arrested on a domestic violence charge.

TMZ, the Hollywood Reporter, KABC, the Associated Press, and BuzzFeed News reported that Avenatti was arrested on Wednesday on “suspicion of felony domestic violence.”

Here’s one thing President Trump and Stormy Daniels have in common: When you insult them, they’re going to fire back.

So when Trump called Daniels “horseface” on Twitter Tuesday morning, the porn actress, director, and writer was quick to reply in kind:

Stormy Daniels, like many women, gets called a lot of names on the internet — including by the president of the United States.

But in a feat of Twitter jiujitsu, she manages to turn the insults around and make her tormentors look ridiculous.

A federal judge dismissed porn actress Stormy Daniels’s defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump on Monday, but it’s not over between the two: The legal battle over their nondisclosure agreement is still ongoing.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006. She filed a lawsuit against the president in April, arguing he defamed her by suggesting she made up a claim that someone had threatened her in 2011 after she agreed to an interview about their alleged affair.

If you, like many Americans who use social media, woke up this morning wondering why Toad — the beloved Nintendo character and Mushroom Kingdom institution — was trending, our advice is to let yourself believe it’s because Nintendo of America is doing another “Toad Takeover” promotion and pay it no more mind. Just trust us.

However, if you already have an inkling of why Toad is suddenly trending and you need a little more context, well, we’re sorry, but we’re here for you.

On Tuesday, Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on eight federal charges, including campaign finance violations from when he paid $130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniel in the weeks before the 2016 election.

Despite several conflicting stories and justifications from Cohen and Donald Trump in the past, the president’s former personal lawyer and fixer admitted that he violated campaign finance laws that limit contributions and require disclosure to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday suggested that Donald Trump’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels was a myth because he would never go for someone who looked like her — the same logic the president has used to deflect accusations of sexual misconduct.

“When you look at Stormy Daniels ...” Giuliani said at a press conference in Israel, grimacing. “Look at his three wives, right? Beautiful women. Classy women. Women of great substance. Stormy Daniels?”

President Donald Trump has now admitted repaying Michael Cohen more than $100,000 for the Stormy Daniels hush money on his new financial disclosure form — but the admission may have gotten him into even more legal trouble.

That’s because David Apol, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), is disputing Trump’s assertion that he wasn’t required to report the debt — and has sent along the matter for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to look into.

The Stormy Daniels saga is becoming a massive story. It’s not only responsible for cornering President Trump into admitting to something that might be a violation of campaign finance law; it’s also turning into a cultural touchstone, with Daniels playing herself to Alec Baldwin’s version of Trump on Saturday Night Live.

But to Fox News’s top pundit, Sean Hannity, the story is “old news.” And on much of the Fox News Channel, it’s not even old news; it’s barely news at all.

Stormy Daniels has dominated the domestic political news environment over the past week, with high-profile media appearances by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Daniels’s attorney Michael Avenatti making headlines and leading the Sunday shows.

Among dedicated Trump haters, that’s made Daniels and Avenatti stars. Jacob Weisberg at Slate hails the attorney as a “brilliant egomaniac who could bring Trump down” while TPM’s Josh Marshall hails his ability to keep Trump off balance and force him into mistakes.

Michael Cohen took part in two financial transactions in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election that gave him access to as much as $774,000, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is under federal criminal investigation and at the center of several stories involving payoffs to women who claim to have had relationships with the president — namely, porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

In February 2016, Cohen increased the amount he could use on a bank credit line tied to his apartment at Trump Park Avenue in Manhattan by $245,000. He and his wife, Laura, opened a $500,000 home-equity credit line at First Republic Bank and weeks later closed out an old home-equity line for $255,000 with TD Bank, essentially doubling what he could borrow.

President Donald Trump knew about Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to keep porn actress Stormy Daniels quiet about their alleged affair months before telling reporters he knew nothing about it in April, according to a report from the New York Times. Trump and the White House have repeatedly changed their stories on what happened; this week, Rudy Giuliani said Trump had repaid Cohen for the hush money — a new revelation.

According to the Times report on Friday, it’s not clear exactly when Trump learned of the payment, which Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, made in October 2016. But he knew of it months before April, when he — if the Times’ reporting is right — lied to reporters aboard Air Force One, saying he had no knowledge of the payment. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen is my attorney,” Trump said when asked Why Cohen had made the payment. “You’ll have to ask Michael.” Per the Times, Trump knew that Cohen had “succeeded” in keeping Daniels’ allegations from becoming public.

President Trump confirmed in a series of tweets Thursday morning that he repaid his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen for the hush money he delivered to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

His confession came the morning after the reveal by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s new outside attorney, that Trump had paid back Cohen for the Daniels money. Giuliani insisted the money wasn’t related to the campaign, but his statement only raised more questions — and directly contradicted the past statements of Trump and his associates.

Correction: A previous version of this article cited an NBC News report saying federal prosecutors had wiretapped the phones of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and recorded at least one phone call between him and the White House. NBC News has since issued a correction to say that prosecutors had actually taken the far more modest step of pulling Cohen’s phone logs. The article has been updated with the corrected information.

Federal investigators pulled the phone call logs of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and business associate.

The past 24 hours of news in President Donald Trump’s various legal imbroglios — the replacement of outgoing lawyer Ty Cobb with Emmet T. Flood, who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment as president, and the admission of Rudy Giuliani to Sean Hannity (subsequently confirmed by Trump on Twitter) that Trump did in fact reimburse Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election — are powerful reminders of something that can’t be said often enough: Trump and his White House lie all the time, without apparent compunction.

Giuliani’s admission was shocking because it revealed the lie: Trump’s April claim that he knew nothing about Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels. Compared to that revelation — which has obvious consequences for the ongoing legal battle between Daniels and Trump — the lawyer shake-up and the lies it revealed may seem like small ball. But that’s the point: The president and his administration lie about things big and small alike, simply because they can.

Rudy Giuliani’s freewheeling interviews to Fox News and other media outlets this week have cleared up some details regarding Stormy Daniels’s hush money but have left other details, and a host of legal questions, still unanswered. Yet it seems that both Trump and Cohen remain in some legal jeopardy — either for possibly violating campaign finance laws or for other disclosure violations.

The facts are these: On October 27, 2016, Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $130,000, through Daniels’s lawyer Keith Davidson, so she wouldn’t come forward about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. This occurred 12 days before the presidential election, while Trump was being besieged by a series of sexual harassment accusations from many different women.

If anyone in America still needed an explanation of how rich people use their money to silence others, President Donald Trump has you covered.

In a series of tweets Thursday morning, he laid out the process by which “celebrities and people of wealth” like himself use nondisclosure agreements to keep people from talking about them in public. Trump specifically explained that he reimbursed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for paying porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence.

In a tweetstorm this morning aimed at containing the fallout from Wednesday night’s revelation by Rudy Giuliani that Donald Trump repaid Michael Cohen for hush money Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels, the president attempted to thread the various legal needles involved in trying to explain how this arrangement did not violate campaign finance law.

Whether that argument succeeds on its own narrow legal terms is, of course, interesting and important (as is the question of whether Trump’s current story is true or if he is once again lying). But the broader issue posed by the Stormy situation is simpler: A president who is in the habit of cutting secret six-figure checks is a president who is subject to a wide range of implicit and explicit blackmail by anyone ranging from a porn actress to a foreign intelligence service.

Rudy Giuliani, who just joined President Trump’s legal team, dropped a bombshell on Fox News Wednesday: Trump repaid the $130,000 in hush money that his longtime attorney Michael Cohen paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

Trump has denied knowing anything about the hush money, so Giuliani was directly contradicting his client. Trump then took to Twitter early Thursday morning to confirm Giuliani’s account. Trump’s tweets — which were written in dense legalese — mean the president is now contradicting himself.

Stormy Daniels and Harold Bornstein know how to deal with a bully. Head on.

Trump’s former physician of 35 years revealed Tuesday that, in a surprise to no one, he was not the author of the letter certifying Trump’s physical fitness for office during the campaign, a letter that read like a Trump magnetic poetry kit.

Porn actress Stormy Daniels is suing Donald Trump for defamation over comments the president made in a tweet.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is alleging Trump defamed her by suggesting she fabricated a claim that someone had threatened her in 2011 after she had agreed to an interview with a magazine about an affair she says she had with Trump in 2006.

Karen McDougal can talk about Donald Trump.

The ex-Playboy model reached a settlement with National Enquirer’s publisher American Media Inc. (AMI) that releases her from an agreement that barred her from speaking publicly about an alleged affair she had with Trump in 2006 and 2007.

Federal authorities reportedly seized recordings, among other evidence, from Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen in a recent raid, according to a new report from CNN. Among those recordings: conversations between Cohen and an attorney for two women who both received hush money to hide their alleged affairs with Donald Trump.

CNN’s Gloria Borger, Sara Sidner, and Scott Glover report that Cohen recorded his conversations with attorney Keith Davidson, who represented porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom received money to stay silent about their alleged encounters with Trump. Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 before the election, and he allegedly helped coordinate a $150,000 payment to McDougal from American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer.

On April 3, 2017, Republican National Committee finance chair Steve Wynn announced the addition of new members to the committee’s leadership team, with two names leading the pack as national deputy chairs: Elliott Broidy and Michael Cohen. “The challenge of guiding a swollen and overreaching government to a position that serves its citizens in a truly efficient manner will be best served by the leadership our team hopes to achieve,” Wynn said in a statement.

In January of this year, Wynn resigned from the committee after dozens of women accused him of sexual assault and abuse. On Monday of this week, Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room were raided by FBI agents investigating his role in making hush money payments to two women on behalf of Donald Trump.