President Donald Trump says hush money payments made by his former lawyer Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal don’t constitute a campaign violation because the money came from his personal funds.
In an excerpt of a Fox & Friends interview released Wednesday, Trump appeared to suggest that he was exonerated by the fact that the payments came out of his personal finances, and said he only became aware of Cohen’s payments after the fact.
“Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me.”
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Trump’s remarks contradict Cohen’s statement, made under oath in a federal court, in which he said that Trump instructed him to make the payments.
Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud. His plea deal states that the payments were made specifically to influence the 2016 presidential election by covering up Trump’s alleged extramarital affairs.
Trump has accused Cohen of making up stories in order to secure a deal from prosecutors.
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“I don’t know if you know, but I tweeted about the payments,” Trump said in the Fox & Friends interview. “But they didn’t come out of the campaign. In fact, my first question when I heard about it was ‘Did they come out of the campaign?’ because that could be a little dicey. And they didn’t come out of the campaign and that’s big.”
He added the payments were “not even a campaign violation.”
Trump was referring to a May 3 Twitter thread explaining his reimbursement of Cohen for the payment to Daniels.
However, Cohen’s lawyer told CNN that Trump’s remarks on Fox & Friends demonstrated “an incorrect understanding of the law.”
Lanny Davis said prosecutors have found that the payment to Daniels was made just two weeks before the election, and was motivated by fears that the porn star was set to go public with allegations of her affair with Trump just before the election.
“So the finding of the prosecutors, subject to a jury and a trial, is that the motivation as a principle political purpose, made that donation illegal and a felony,” Davis said.
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Trump also suggested on his Fox & Friends appearance that predecessor Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was treated leniently in being fined $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission for failing to file 48-hour contribution reports for donations totaling some $1.9 million.
“If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation but he had a different attorney general and they viewed it a lot differently,” Trump said.
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However, the Obama campaign was not found to have wilfully violated the law.
In Cohen’s case, he admitted he knew he was breaking the law by making the payments. Unlike the Obama case, where the issue was timely reporting, the hush money payments were never disclosed at all on Trump’s campaign filings.
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Andrew Herman, a lawyer specializing in campaign finance at law firm Miller & Chevalier, said the two cases are “completely different species.”
“One is a paperwork error. And the other is a conscious attempt to obscure payments made to affect an election,” he said.
— With files from the Associated Press