Giuliani confirms Trump paid off porn star via lawyer

WASHINGTON: America’s tawdry drama involving its President and a porn star got messier and more complicated on Wednesday after the President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Donald Trump reimbursed his personal lawyer Michael Cohen $130,000 in hush money paid to adult actress Stormy Daniels.

The payoff was aimed at defusing her claim, which Trump denies, that she had a one-night stand with the man who was running for President and would eventually be elected.

Giuliani’s belated confirmation that Trump reimbursed Cohen, a statement he was making with the President’s knowledge and consent, is evidently aimed at heading off more serious charges that the Cohen payoff may have violated campaign finance laws. Such a violation would jeopardize the Trump presidency.

But in a tortured explanation to the media, and at the risk of embarrassing the President (who wasn’t at all embarrassed and confirmed the pay-off) Giuliani maintained that Cohen was reimbursed from Trump’s personal funds, and therefore there was no violation of campaign finance laws.

The explanation contradicted Trump’s earlier insistence that he had no knowledge of the payoffs, a statement his aides had parroted for months. But Giuliani, a former New York Mayor who recently joined Trump’s legal team, offered a convoluted explanation, backed later by the President’s own tweets, on how and why there was a pay-off and Trump was unaware of the details: Trump paid Cohen a monthly retainer of $35,000 and Cohen used that money to take care of any troubles his client might have without bothering him with details.

So why did Cohen pay hush-money to a porn star on behalf of his client if her allegations were false? Giuliani suggested that Trump and Cohen saw it as an incidental expense to take care of pre-election harassment. “Neither one of them saw it as a campaign thing, they thought of it as a personal thing. Personal reputation, family, wife, harassment charge. She doesn’t want a lot of money? Pay her. Let her go away,” he explained.

In a series of three elaborate tweets, the President broadly confirmed Giuliani’s explanations, saying “Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA. These agreements are very common among celebrities and people of wealth.”

“The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair. Prior to its violation by Ms. Clifford and her attorney, this was a private agreement. Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction,” Trump added, warning that the NDA “is in full force and effect and it will be used in Arbitration for damages against Ms Clifford (Daniels).”

All these were minor details in a larger confrontation between a maverick President and an established order in America. At the heart of the arguments now is the nature and extent of executive privilege in the U.S Presidency and whether the laws of the land apply to him.

With FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller seemingly determined to interview the President-- through a grand jury subpoena if necessary -- in course of the probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump and aides are arguing the President is beyond the remit of the Justice Department, which reports to him and is therefore subservient to him. He can hire and fire its personnel, as he did in the case of FBI Director James Comey, and he can similarly fire Mueller too – for interfering with the serious business of Presidency and taking care of America’s vital national interests.

In one of his many tweets over the past 24 hours, Trump approvingly quoted what his former lawyer John Dowd reportedly told Special Counsel Mueller: “This isn’t some game. You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

“With North Korea, China, the Middle East and so much more, there is not much time to be thinking about this, especially since there was no Russian ‘Collusion’, Trump added, alerting his followers to the imminent release from a North Korean labor camp of three hostages that past administrations had been seeking without success.

Executive authority and privilege is limited in parliamentary democracies where the people and legislature have primacy. But the situation is less clear in the United States, where the White House has increasingly asserted what the historian Arthur Schlesinger termed “Imperial Presidency,” where the President is beyond law and reproach, except by way of impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Up until the 1930, the President had an office and staff functioning out of Capitol Hill, but since that time, the White House has taken on more and more powers and added more staff to function as a stand-alone executive.