The Trump administration has been bogged down by a massive amount of scandal since the belligerent businessman, Donald Trump took office as president last year. Earlier this year, adding to the weight of the administration’s corruption, reports circulated that the president’s team had facilitated a massive hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels covering an alleged affair she had with the president.
In the time since that revelation, the president’s team members, and particularly his lawyer Michael Cohen, have been engaged in extended legal disputes. On the one side, Cohen is facing a broad criminal investigation that includes questions of whether he did anything illegal in facilitating the hush money to Daniels. On the other side, he and the president are facing legal challenges from Daniels tied in part to the question of whether or not the nondisclosure agreement that accompanied the hush money is valid.
A central component to the president’s side’s legal strategy so far has been the claim that the president did not know about the payment. According to that line of reasoning, the president should be considered free from any and all responsibility in this situation.
However, Wednesday night the president’s lawyer and longtime supporter Rudy Giuliani upended that by telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that the Trump actually did reimburse Cohen for the hush money. The claim from the Trump team in the past was that Cohen had, of his own accord, gotten the money for the deal from a home equity loan.
In the face of fallout from his remarks to Hannity, Giuliani has come up with a new defense for the president. According to the former New York City mayor, the president did give Cohen money to cover the deal, but he didn’t actually know what that money was being used for.
Giuliani told Fox News chief White House correspondent John Roberts Wednesday that the president “didn’t know what the money was used for” and Cohen had simply “told the President he had “expenses” for which POTUS reimbursed him.”
In other words, Giuliani’s grand ideas for a legal defense for his client include claiming that Donald Trump, as the real estate mogul he became before assuming the office of the presidency, dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars from his personal coffers without actually knowing what that sum was being used for.
Following up Giuliani’s comments, the president himself took to Twitter early Thursday to confirm that what his new attorney told Sean Hannity was accurate, adding a jab at Stormy Daniels herself that indicates a commitment on his part to pursuing damages from Clifford under the terms of the previously mentioned NDA. The Daniels team claims that NDA is invalid because the president himself never signed it.
The president’s Thursday admission that what Giuliani told Hannity is accurate contradicts what he told reporters previously, having claimed no knowledge of the payment to Daniels.
Giuliani’s flimsy defense that the president reimbursed his lawyer for the payment and even still didn’t actually know about it until recently is no doubt going to be tested in any one of a number of legal battles. Even if the money did come from the president, it could constitute a campaign finance law violation, because it was meant to prop up the president’s campaign but wasn’t reported.
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