President Donald Trump repaid his attorney Michael Cohen the $130,000 Cohen has acknowledged paying porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election for her silence about their alleged affair in 2006, the president's new lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, said Wednesday night.

Appearing on Fox News Channel's "Hannity," Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and former U.S. attorney for Manhattan whom Trump hired to join his personal legal team last month, revealed for the first time that Trump had paid back the money to Cohen, who had said previously that he had paid Daniels with his own funds and without Trump's knowledge.

Cohen and White House aides have denied that Trump had an affair with Daniels. An attorney for Cohen told a federal judge last month that Cohen also represents Sean Hannity, the show's host.

"That was money that was paid by his lawyer" to Daniels, Giuliani told Hannity. "The president reimbursed it over several months."

The White House declined to comment, referring reporters to Trump's outside legal team, which includes Giuliani.

Giuliani cast the statement as substantiation that the payment didn't constitute an illegal campaign contribution, as Democrats and other critics of Trump have contended, asserting that it didn't come from campaign funds.

The payment, he said, is "going to turn out to be perfectly legal."

"That money was not campaign money," he said of Trump's reimbursement. "Sorry — I'm giving you a fact that you don't know. It's not campaign money — no campaign finance violation."

But Norm Eisen, chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a nonprofit group that has filed a complaint with the Justice Department over the payment to Daniels, suggested Wednesday night on Twitter that Trump still may have broken the law "by failing to disclose the loan from Cohen on his federal presidential financial disclosures."

As recently as last month, Trump denied that he had been aware at the time that Cohen had paid Daniels.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One in April, the president said not only that he hadn't known about the payment but also that he didn't know where the money had come from.

Asked why Cohen paid Daniels, Trump replied: "You'll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You'll have to ask Michael."

And it was only last month, in an interview on Fox News, that Trump even acknowledged that Cohen had represented him in the "crazy Stormy Daniels deal." The president then went on to reiterate that he had nothing to do with Cohen's business after the lawyer's office and hotel room were raided by the FBI.

Daniels has sued the president to void the nondisclosure agreement arranged by Cohen, alleging that it is invalid because Trump never signed it. She has described it as a "hush" money agreement intended to buy her silence before Election Day.

"I am absolutely speechless at this revelation," Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, said Wednesday night.

"The American people have been lied to about this agreement, about the $130,000," Avenatti said in an interview on MSNBC's "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell."

"There are going to be serious charges that may result from that," he said, adding: "Make no mistake about it: Justice is going to be served."