The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report on Friday which detailed how President Donald Trump was intimately involved with his former lawyer Michael Cohen's coordination of multiple hush-money agreements with women who claimed they had sexual affairs with Trump before he became president.
Citing dozens of interviews and documents also said Trump may have violated federal campaign-finance laws due to his participation in the deals.
Trump previously denied having any knowledge about a $130,000 payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006.
Trump and Cohen are both being sued by Daniels in connection with the nondisclosure agreement they signed with barred her from discussing their sexual encounters.
Trump has repeatedly denied having a sexual relationship with Daniels.
Cohen pleaded guilty earlier this year to campaign-finance violations, admitting to federal prosecutors he made payments to at least two women at the direction of a candidate for political office, which turned out to be Trump.
Cohen said those payments were made to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, which brought charges against Cohen, has collected evidence of Trump's involvement with all the hush money payments, including how as a presidential candidate he "directed deals in phone calls and meetings" with Cohen.
Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti said the report published by the WSJ "confirms what we have been saying all along."
"In light of the sworn testimony and evidence relating to the payment to my client and Trump's involvement (confirming our allegations), we are calling for the immediate indictment of the president. No one is above the law in the United States."
The White House and Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulow did not return requests for comment on the report.
Federal prosecutors gathered enough evidence that revealed how Trump coordinated with Cohen and his friend and media executive David Pecker to have the National Enquirer tabloid purchase the silence of Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Those payments may have amounted to campaign finance violations since any funds used to aid a campaign are supposed to come from that campaign's coffers, but Cohen made the hush-money payments personally and was later reimbursed by Trump for the expense.
Trump claimed "nobody cares about that" to the WSJ during an October interview which asked about the payments, even going so far to call his longtime lawyer Cohen as a "public-relations person" who only "represented me on very small things."
"Mr. Cohen has also described to prosecutors his discussions with Mr. Trump and a Trump Organization executive about how to pay Ms. Clifford without leaving the candidate's fingerprints on the deal," the Journal article said.
Trump leveraged his longtime relationship with Pecker to kill the stories about him in the press that would have revealed unsavory details about his personal life when his campaign took off in 2016.
Pecker and Dylan Howard, one of the American Media CEO's top executives, met with McDougal to coordinate the payment to her, but when he refused to do so with Daniels, Cohen arranged the deal and was later reimbursed by Trump.
Daniels and McDougal have both filed lawsuits to release them from the non-disclosure agreements.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
