Pornstar Stormy Daniels, who had an alleged affair with Donald Trump just after Melania Trump gave birth to their son, threatened to uncover her and Trump’s relationship just days before the 2016 election.
According to a report published late Friday in the Washington Post, her threat to reveal the affair led Trump attorney Michael Cohen scrambling to pay her $130,000 on Oct. 27 so she would keep quiet.
As the Post noted,” The Wall Street Journal first reported the payment to Daniels in January. The cancellation of the deal and the exact date of the payment have not been previously reported.”
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The 2016 election was less than a month away, and Donald Trump’s attorney had blown the deadline for paying Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her alleged affair with the future president.
In an Oct. 17 email, an attorney for Daniels — a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — threatened to cancel the nondisclosure agreement by the end of the day.
That very morning, Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, had created a limited liability company, public records show, that ultimately would serve as a vehicle for Daniels’s payoff. But the money had not arrived. A second email to Cohen, a short time after the first, said Daniels was calling the deal off.
…
Ten days later, the $130,000 payment arrived, according to another email reviewed by The Post. Daniels’s story about her sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier would remain under wraps long past Election Day.
This should have been a front-page story for weeks
Aside from the fact that nobody truly believes that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen forked over more than $100,000 of his own money to protect his boss, the payment itself has sparked legal questions – many of which have been overlooked or lost in the constantly changing news cycle.
As the Post added in its reporting, the payoff could have violated campaign law, according to a pair of FEC complains.
“The timing of the Oct. 27 payment, 13 days after the initial deadline and just 12 days before the election, could be significant,” the report noted. “Two complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission argue that the payment was intended to influence the Nov. 8 election and violated campaign finance law because it was not reported as an in-kind donation.”
Both the legal and the ethical aspects surrounding this episode are jaw-dropping. If former President Barack Obama had an affair with a porn star and paid her to shut up about it just before the election, it would be front-page news until the end of time.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
