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.
Donald Trump just tweeted he paid back his lawyer for the Stormy Daniels hush money
The president’s new lawyer contradicts Trump’s previous statement that he didn’t know about the $130,000 payment.
Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.
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.
The drama began Wednesday night, when Giuliani told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the money to Daniels was “funneled through a law firm, and then the president repaid it.”
That’s quite a departure from a statement Trump made last month denying knowing anything about the payment Cohen had made to Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement to keep her from speaking about an alleged affair she had with Trump in 2006.
“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen is my attorney,” Trump said in April, when asked about the payment. “You’ll have to ask Michael.”
Cohen, who is currently under federal investigation, had previously said that he paid Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) with his own money. In a statement to the New York Times in February, Cohen said that “neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”
Giuliani, in his interview with Hannity, said the money was not campaign money, though he didn’t go into detail about how or when Trump repaid Cohen.
In a later interview with the Washington Post, Giuliani said Trump paid back Cohen in a series of payments in 2017 and possibly as late as 2018.
He added to the Post that he didn’t know when Trump became aware of the nondisclosure agreement and settlement, suggesting the president learned many details about the deal in the wake of an FBI raid on Cohen’s office last month.
“The president was always going to make sure he got it back, and enough money to pay the taxes,” Giuliani said.
But Giuliani’s comments — and Trump’s subsequent tweets — still raise questions about Trump’s possible involvement in the deal to pay off Daniels.
They also add another twist to the spiraling legal problems tied to the Stormy Daniels saga. The FBI raided Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room in April, and agents reportedly seized documents and other materials related to the payments Cohen made to Daniels.
Daniels has also filed a lawsuit claiming the nondisclosure agreement she signed is void because Trump never signed it. That suit is temporarily on hold for 90 days, as Cohen faces more pressing legal troubles in the form of that federal criminal probe. Daniels is also suing Trump for defamation over comments he made in a tweet referencing a composite sketch of a man who Daniels said threatened her in 2011 to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, responded to Giuliani’s comments on Twitter, saying: “We predicted months ago that it would be proven that the American people had been lied to as to the $130k payment and what Mr. Trump knew, when he knew it and what he did in connection with it.”
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