“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.
How Stormy Daniels might be outsmarting Trump by denying an affair
In the Kimmel interview, Daniels strongly suggested that she did, in fact, sign some kind of nondisclosure agreement.
KIMMEL: Do you have a nondisclosure agreement?
DANIELS: Do I?
KIMMEL: You can’t say whether you have a nondisclosure agreement, but if you didn’t have a nondisclosure agreement, you most certainly could say, “I don’t have a nondisclosure agreement.” Yes?
DANIELS: You’re so smart, Jimmy.
Daniels, it seems, is trying to remain in technical compliance with the nondisclosure agreement while leading the media and the public to conclude that her denials are not genuine and that the affair was real.
.. Whether Daniels can engage in such innuendo without violating the nondisclosure agreement “turns on the actual terms and language of the agreement, which I have not seen,” said Kathleen Cahill, a Baltimore sexual harassment lawyer.
Trump is, indeed, in a bind: He can’t sue Daniels for breach of contract without admitting that a contract exists.
.. Daniels could open herself up to a different kind of lawsuit, a defamation suit, if she were to explicitly claim that she and Trump had an affair.
“It would be qualitatively different if she came forward and said, ‘Yes, I had an affair,’ ” Katz said. “Then I think he would sue her.”
For Trump, Book Raises Familiar Questions of Loyalty and Candor
In President George W. Bush’s last year in office, his former press secretary, Scott McClellan, wrote a tell-all book concluding that the Iraq war was a “serious strategic blunder” based on the “ambition, certitude and self-deceit” of a White House that was not fully honest with the American people.
The president’s remaining advisers were livid at what they considered the betrayal of an aide who had been with Mr. Bush since his Texas days. But when Dana Perino, who then held the same spokesman’s job, expressed her indignation, Mr. Bush sighed and told her to find a way to forgive Mr. McClellan or risk being consumed by anger.
.. while the White House and various others challenge the accuracy of specific episodes in the book, its broader portrayal largely squares with the journalistic coverage of the past year based on the president’s own staff.
.. Mr. Bannon is quoted in the book saying things that other advisers have said confidentially for months — that the president is stunningly undisciplined with no patience or interest in learning and driven by intemperate, sometimes absurd motivations. At one point, Mr. Bannon describes Mr. Trump acting “like a 9-year-old,” an observation that has power not because it was unique to those who worked for the president but because it is now on the record in Mr. Bannon’s name.
.. Mr. Trump, of all presidents, should know what to expect given his predilection for making employees sign nondisclosure agreements, a practice he brought from the private sector to his 2016 campaign and the subsequent presidential transition.
.. Mr. Stephanopoulos’s former White House colleagues stayed away from the launch party lest they risk Mr. Clinton’s ire.
.. Mr. Panetta was pushed out. The second was a more respectful but at times unflattering portrayal of his experiences as C.I.A. director and defense secretary for Barack Obama, whom he deemed smart but vacillating and overly cautious.
.. As aggravated as Mr. Trump may be with Mr. Bannon’s apostasy and Mr. Wolff’s book, he may need to get used to it. Just one year in, Mr. Trump faces many years of books to come.
.. Mr. Trump may have more to wonder about with Omarosa Manigault Newman
.. she had seen things “that have upset me.” She added ominously, “It is a profound story that I know the world will want to hear.”
.. Mr. Comey has a different understanding of the meaning of loyalty than the president does. His book is due out on May 1. Its title: “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership.”