“Later on I knew,” Trump said. “Later on. But you have to understand, Ainsley, what he did — and they weren’t taken out of campaign finance. That’s a big thing. That’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They came from me. I tweeted about it. I don’t know if you know, but I tweeted about the payments. But they didn’t come out of the campaign. In fact, my first question when I heard about it was, ‘Did they come out of the campaign?’ Because that could be a little dicey. They didn’t come out of the campaign, and that’s big. It’s not even a campaign violation.”
.. Cohen explained that he committed the campaign-finance violations “at the direction of the candidate” and with the “purpose of influencing the election.”
.. Based on Trump’s interview on Fox, he seems to think that a campaign-finance violation would have occurred if campaign funds were used to pay off Daniels and McDougal, rather than his personal cash, which was used to reimburse Cohen for the initial Daniels payment. The reverse of this is true, as The Huffington Post first reported.
.. If Trump had routed money through his campaign to pay off women, it would be legal. Campaigns can spend unlimited amounts of money. The problem would have been that if Trump did use his campaign to pay off any women, it would have defeated the purpose of making the payment, which was to ensure silence. Such an expenditure would have had to be reported to the Federal Election Commission and publicly disclosed.
.. Trump’s best defense is one that Cohen claimed was true earlier this year, and one that Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has also latched onto: That the arrangement was made not to boost Trump’s candidacy but to shield his family, particularly his wife, Melania Trump, from the embarrassing information. That argument was what helped former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina in a similar case.
But Cohen’s testimony, backed up by what the government says is evidence that corroborates it, hurts that narrative.
Allen Weisselberg, Longtime Trump Organization CFO, Is Granted Immunity in Cohen Probe
granted immunity to another longtime Trump ally: David Pecker, the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer .. A person familiar with Mr. Weisselberg’s thinking said he didn’t know that money was intended to pay Ms. Clifford, who goes professionally by Stormy Daniels, when he agreed in January 2017 to a $35,000 monthly retainer for Mr. Cohen.
.. Executives at the Trump Organization “ ‘grossed up’ for tax purposes” Mr. Cohen’s requested reimbursement, doubling it to $360,000, and added a $60,000 bonus
.. At the Trump Organization, Mr. Trump was known for being meticulous about payments the company made. Mr. Weisselberg would bring Mr. Trump checks to sign for the company on a daily basis, according to a person close to the company. Mr. Trump would routinely ask questions about the checks and what they were for, at times requesting Mr. Weisselberg hold off on specific payments, the person said.
Cohen Wasn’t Alone: Records Suggest Others Had Role in Hush Money Arrangements
Prosecutors said Trump Organization executives were involved in reimbursing Mr. Cohen for that payment, accepting his phony invoices that listed it as a legal expense. The other charge concerned a complicated arrangement in which a tabloid bought the rights to the story about the former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, then killed it.
.. “I think the allegations reveal that executives in the Trump Organization — more than one, and not clear how many more than one — were involved in funneling the payments to Stormy Daniels and may have significant legal exposure as a result of that,” she said, even though their actions came after the fact.
“Obviously, they are trying to hide something,” she added. “There’s a normal way to do this and then there’s the way they did it.”
.. The company recorded the reimbursement to Ms. Clifford as legal fees, which legal experts characterized as unusual.
Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Clifford $130,000, but he was ultimately reimbursed $420,000 by the Trump Organization.
Here’s why: Mr. Cohen received a $60,000 bonus, and the company allocated about $180,000 to cover the taxes that Mr. Cohen had to pay on the hush money.
There was also an additional $50,000 that Mr. Cohen received after putting in a claim for “tech services.”
That related to work that Mr. Cohen “solicited” from a technology company during the campaign, the court filing said.
Several current and former prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers said that if the officials at the Trump Organization were aware of what the payments were for, they could possibly be criminally culpable.
And they said that if the $420,000 in payments to Mr. Cohen, which were recorded as legal expenses, were written off as a tax deduction, as would be the general practice, it could lead to criminal tax charges.
.. only the first two of the 12 monthly $35,000 payments to Mr. Cohen were paid by a trust that owns the company; the other 10 were paid from Mr. Trump’s personal accounts.
.. the person, who would only discuss the payments on the condition of anonymity, could not say who approved the reimbursement; why it was approved if no one knew what it was for; why the payments were recorded as legal expenses; and why, even though they were recorded as such, they were not deducted from the company’s taxes.
.. “It would be highly unusual to record it as legal fees and then not deduct it.”
Michael Cohen Deals a Blow to His Former Boss
President Trump’s former, longtime personal lawyer directly implicated him in a federal crime
The conviction of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on tax evasion and bank fraud charges undercut Mr. Trump’s assertion that his was a campaign and a presidency that would “drain the swamp” of the unsavory professional political class.Mr. Manafort was and is of precisely that political class. The actions for which he was convicted had nothing to do with his work for the president, yet the optics are, to say the least, unhelpful for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump can and will distance himself from both Mr. Manafort and the felonies of which he now has been convicted. Indeed, after landing in West Virginia for a campaign rally, Mr. Trump expressed sympathy for Mr. Manafort but said “this has nothing to do with Russian collusion.” He continued to describe the hunt for a Russian connection as a “witch hunt.”
It will be much harder to create distance from Mr. Cohen.