Storm Watch: the latest developments in the Stormy Daniels case

She faces formidable opposition from Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who has claimed he personally paid the $130,000 for Daniels’s silence. He obtained a restraining order at the end of February, shortly before Daniels filed her lawsuit in court, and has now filed papers in federal court accusing Daniels of violating the terms of the nondisclosure agreement. The Washington Post reports that Cohen is seeking a total of $20 million in damages — $1 million per alleged violation.

But another one of Cohen’s legal disputes might undercut his efforts. He is pursuing a libel suit against BuzzFeed, and the website is attempting a legal maneuver that might allow Daniels’s records of any relationship with Trump to be made public.

.. Cohen, through Essential Consultants, LLC, the company he set up to pay Daniels last October, will request to move Daniels’s dispute out of the open courts back to private arbitration, reports Bloomberg.

And Cohen’s efforts probably have the support of President Donald Trump. In a separate filing on the president’s behalf, another Trump attorney said he agreed with Cohen’s decision to move the case back to private arbitration.

Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, responded to Cohen’s suit in a series of tweets, calling it “yet another bullying tactic from the president and Mr. Cohen.”

“They are not attempting to remove this case to federal court in order to increase their changes that the matter will be decided in private arbitration,” he wrote.

The fact that a sitting president is pursuing over $20M in bogus ‘damages’ against a private citizen, who is only trying to tell the public what really happened, is remarkable. Likely unprecedented in our history. We are NOT going away and we will NOT be intimidated. #basta

.. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed is using a legal maneuver that might give Daniels the chance to tell her story.
The news outlet is embroiled in its own litigation with Cohen, who is suing BuzzFeed for libel over its publication of the Steele dossier, a collection of allegations about Trump’s dealings with Russia, last year. As part of that lawsuit, BuzzFeed has asked Daniels to preserve all documents and records relating to her dealings with Cohen and her 2016 nondisclosure agreement.

.. BuzzFeed is arguing that the Daniels affair helps bolster the legitimacy of some of the claims in the dossier — specifically, that Cohen met with Russian officials in Prague and tried to pay them off to cover up the relationship between the Trump campaign and the people with ties to the Kremlin. If Cohen paid off Daniels, it’s essentially saying, he might have paid off Russia too.

.. If BuzzFeed’s gambit is successful, lawyers may have to depose Daniels in that case. And unless a judge intervenes, according to Politico, it’s possible all those details might be made public.

.. Trump’s lawyers are reportedly weighing lega l action against CBS, though it’s unclear that would actually stop the network from airing the interview.

.. Daniels’s mother is a Trump supporter

Daniels’s estranged mother, Sheila Gregory, said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News that she doesn’t want the scandal to hurt the president.

“If Mr. Trump runs four more times, I would vote for him every time,” Gregory said. “I like him. I like the way he handles things. It’s time this country is put back where it belongs — taking care of the people here instead of the people who don’t belong here.”