“The thing seems so weird that it invites an inquiry into what you’re doing,” he said. “Lawyers don’t go around giving $130,000 to strangers, benefiting their clients, without billing their clients.”
.. Keith Davidson, a Los Angeles lawyer who represented Ms. Clifford in the 2016 transaction, issued a statement Wednesday declaring that Mr. Cohen had told him at the time that the $130,000 payment was coming from his own funds.
“I represented Stephanie Clifford in the Michael Cohen/Stephanie Clifford transaction,” Mr. Davidson’s statement said. “I read today that Michael Cohen reports that the source of the $130,000 paid to Ms. Clifford was from his own personal funds. That assertion is in complete harmony with what he informed me of at the time of the transaction.”
.. Ms. Clifford believes that Mr. Cohen, in making his statement, has breached a nondisclosure agreement she signed in connection with the payment, releasing her from the confidentiality commitment, according to Gina Rodriguez, her manager. Ms. Clifford, she said, is now offering to sell her story to media outlets so that she can tell her version of events.
.. Last month, Mr. Cohen sent Wall Street Journal reporters a written statement in Ms. Clifford’s name denying that she had had “a sexual and/or romantic affair” with Mr. Trump or “received hush money from Mr. Trump.” He also issued his own statement saying that Mr. Trump “vehemently denies” any affair with her.
If evidence emerged showing that those statements were false and that Mr. Cohen knew they were false, his role in disseminating them could violate Rule 8.4, several legal ethics specialists said. It prohibits lawyers from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”
.. “Lawyers are not allowed to lie,” with some exceptions, said Lisa Lerman, a legal ethics professor at the Catholic University of America, and they are “also not allowed to induce other people to engage in conduct that they are prohibited from.”
But Stephen Gillers, a New York University professor of ethics law, said that in practice, the ethics rule against dishonesty is generally not interpreted so broadly as to cover facilitating a lie to the public or to journalists.