President Donald Trump said Thursday that he did not know about the $130,000 in “hush money” that his personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump: I don’t know anything about the $130,000 my lawyer paid Stormy Daniels
It’s his first public statement about the “hush money” his personal lawyer paid to a porn actress.
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Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.
Trump’s denial was the first time he’s made a public statement about the money given to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to keep her silent about her alleged 2006 affair with Trump. The president was responding to questions from reporters after returning from an event in West Virginia.
Trump replied “no” when asked if he had had knowledge about the payment to Daniels. A reporter then asked if he knew why Cohen made the payment.
“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen is my attorney,” Trump said, according to the pool report. “You’ll have to ask Michael.”
Trump also denied knowing where the money to pay Daniels came from and ignored another question on whether he had ever set up a fund that Cohen could use to make such a payment.
The White House has denied Trump had an affair with Daniels. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, filed a lawsuit in March claiming that the nondisclosure agreement she entered into regarding the alleged affair was invalid because Trump never signed it.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, tweeted an apparent reference to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment on charges including perjury, in response to Trump’s remarks: “As history teaches us, it is one thing to deceive the press and quite another to do so under oath.”
Avenatti followed up to say that Daniels’s lawsuit just got stronger: “You can’t have an agreement when one party claims to know nothing about it,” he said.
Trump had been oddly quiet about the whole saga until Thursday. Previously, the closest he had come to directly addressing the scandal was a somewhat cryptic tweet about “Fake News” that he sent out the Monday after Daniels’s primetime 60 Minutes interview on March 25, in which she detailed the alleged affair with Trump and said she had been threatened to keep silent by those close to him.
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