This Stormy hush money shyt is the greatest lie Trump ever told.
RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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The internet was 5 days ahead on the new Cohen story
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Mike Schmidt with two Friday night scoops :KanyeDamn:
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Mike Schmidt with two Friday night scoops :KanyeDamn:
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
Trump Is Said to Know of Stormy Daniels Payment Months Before He Denied It
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, MAGGIE HABERMAN, JIM RUTENBERG and MATT APUZZOMAY 4, 2018
President Trump had denied in April that he knew of a $130,000 hush payment made to a pornographic film actress who claimed to have had an affair with him. Al Drago for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump knew about a six-figure payment that Michael D. Cohen, his personal lawyer, made to a pornographic film actress several months before he denied any knowledge of it to reporters aboard Air Force One in April, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.
How much Mr. Trump knew about the payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress, and who else was aware of it have been at the center of a swirling controversy for the past 48 hours touched off by a television interview with Rudolph W. Giuliani, a new addition to the president’s legal team. The interview was the first time a lawyer for the president had acknowledged that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payments to Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.
It was not immediately clear when Mr. Trump learned of the payment, which Mr. Cohen made in October 2016, at a time when news media outlets were poised to pay her for her story about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. But three people close to the matter said that Mr. Trump knew that Mr. Cohen had succeeded in keeping the allegations from becoming public at the time the president denied it.
Ms. Clifford signed a nondisclosure agreement, and accepted the payment just days before Mr. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump has denied he had an affair with Ms. Clifford and insisted that the nondisclosure agreement was created to prevent any embarrassment to his family.
Mr. Giuliani said this week that the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen totaled $460,000 or $470,000, leaving it unclear what else the payments were for beyond the $130,000 that went to Ms. Clifford. One of the people familiar with the arrangement said that it was a $420,000 total over 12 months.
Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has known since last year the details of how Mr. Cohen was being reimbursed, which was mainly through payments of $35,000 per month from the trust that contains the president’s personal fortune, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangement.
One person close to the Trump Organization said people with the company were aware that Mr. Cohen was still doing “legal work” for the president in 2017, but declined to say more about what Mr. Weisselberg knew. Another person familiar with the situation said that Mr. Weisselberg did not know that Mr. Cohen had paid Ms. Clifford when the retainer payments went through.
If Mr. Weisselberg was involved in directing the use of the funds to silence Ms. Clifford, it could draw Mr. Trump’s company deeper into the federal investigation of Mr. Cohen’s activities, increasing the president’s legal exposure in a wide-ranging case involving the lawyer often described as the president’s “fixer” in New York City.
In interviews on Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Giuliani insisted that the president had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush payment — and then paid him another $330,000, if not more — which was in direct conflict with the longstanding assertion by Mr. Trump and the White House that he did not know about the hush money or where it came from.
In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Giuliani sought to clarify his statements by saying that he did not know whether Mr. Trump had known that some of the payments to Mr. Cohen had gone to Ms. Clifford. “It’s not something I’m aware of, nor is it relevant to what I’m doing, the legal part,” Mr. Giuliani said.
A lawyer for the Trump Organization declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for the organization did not respond to an email about Mr. Weisselberg.
The president has said that he would view any investigation into his finances or those of his family as “a violation,” though he was referring to the investigation into Russia by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III; the investigation into Mr. Cohen is being run by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
The payment to Ms. Clifford is a part of that investigation. The circumstances surrounding it had become all the murkier this week after Mr. Giuliani gave an explanation of how the funds to Ms. Clifford were accounted for that contradicted all those that came before it.
After initially appearing to back Mr. Giuliani’s assertions in a series of Twitter messages on Thursday, Mr. Trump reversed course on Friday, after a series of headlines suggesting that the president had lied about knowing of the hush payment. In remarks to reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Giuliani and said he would eventually “get his facts straight.”
“Virtually everything said has been said incorrectly, and it’s been said wrong, or it’s been covered wrong by the press,” Mr. Trump told reporters, though he excused Mr. Giuliani by explaining he had “just started a day ago.”
In a written statement later in the day, Mr. Giuliani said that he had not been “describing my understanding of the president’s knowledge.” And he reversed a previous suggestion that the payment to Ms. Clifford was motivated by the election. Mr. Giuliani said on Friday that the payment was personal in nature and “would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”
While some White House officials had insisted that Mr. Trump was pleased with Mr. Giuliani’s performance on Fox News in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, two people close to the president painted a different picture. They said that Mr. Trump was displeased with how Mr. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, conducted himself, and that he was also unhappy with Mr. Hannity, a commentator whose advice the president often seeks, in terms of the language he used to describe the payments to Ms. Clifford.
If Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, made the payment primarily out of fear that the allegations would have harmed Mr. Trump’s election prospects, then it would most likely be viewed as an illegal campaign expenditure. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times ORG XMIT: NPX
The nature of the payments is significant because of campaign finance laws that regulate who may contribute to candidates and how much they can give.
If Mr. Cohen or others paid to silence Ms. Clifford primarily out of fear that a public airing of her story would have harmed Mr. Trump’s election prospects — rather than to keep it from his family for personal reasons — then the payment would most likely be viewed as an illegal campaign expenditure. Mr. Giuliani told The Times on Friday that the issue was “primarily” about keeping Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, from being embarrassed by the claim, which Mr. Trump has maintained was false.
But if investigators determine that the hush payment was in effect a campaign expenditure, then how the funds were distributed could take on added legal significance. Mr. Cohen had been careful to say that neither the campaign nor the Trump Organization was involved in the deal or any effort to reimburse him.
Under campaign finance law, Mr. Trump would have been within his rights to pay Ms. Clifford himself as a way to protect his presidential prospects — though he would have had to have formally made note of it in his public campaign filings, which had no accounting of the payment. If he directed Mr. Cohen to pay it on his behalf, then that could qualify as an illegal, coordinated campaign expenditure, even if Mr. Trump later paid him back.
Any involvement by the Trump Organization would further complicate the legal picture, given that American election law is strictest of all when it comes to corporate involvement with political campaigns. Businesses are not allowed to donate directly to campaigns or to coordinate with them.
Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael J. Avenatti, has been arguing for months that Mr. Trump’s company was more involved in the arrangement than Mr. Cohen had been letting on.
After filing a lawsuit on Ms. Clifford’s behalf seeking to get out of the deal — which he has called invalid — Mr. Avenatti showed that Mr. Cohen had used his Trump Organization email at one point in arranging the payment. He also pointed to a secret document in California that a Trump Organization lawyer filed to force Ms. Clifford into arbitration this year.
At the time, the Trump Organization said that the lawyer, Jill A. Martin, who works in California, had acted in a personal capacity to help Mr. Cohen, who needed assistance with the initial arbitration filing from someone licensed in the state. The Trump Organization had said that “the company has had no involvement in the matter.”
In an interview, Mr. Avenatti said that any indication that still more executives at the Trump Organization knew about the effort to reimburse Mr. Cohen for the payment to Ms. Clifford could lead to further investigation of the Trump family business.
“There’s no question it opens up another avenue of inquiry into the depths of the involvement of the Trump Organization,” he said.
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I’m done trying to understand Trump supporters. Why don’t they try to understand me?
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com
Getty Images
This is for Rose.
She is a nice lady who wrote me a nice email in which she spoke about the need to try to understand Donald Trump’s supporters. As Rose put it, “We need to not close ourselves off to how the other side thinks.” It’s a sentiment I hear a lot from progressives, and it bespeaks a great generosity of spirit.
But I couldn’t disagree more.
Don’t get me wrong. Thinking people will always try to see past their own ideological blind spots, to put themselves into the shoes of those they disagree with. That’s an admirable trait. In normal times it’s a trait I would applaud with enthusiasm.
But these are not normal times. Indeed, sometimes, I wonder if we appreciate just how abnormal — how fraught with danger — they really are. Under Trump, American laws, news media and mores are under assault, to say nothing of American democracy itself.
And I’m sorry, but I don’t think “understanding” Trump followers will ameliorate — or even address — any of that. Besides which, is there really so much left to “understand?”
Not from where I sit. Long before Trump even existed as a political force, many of us noted with alarm the rise of a backlash among right wingers deeply angry and profoundly terrified by the writing on the demographic wall. Said writing foretold — and for that matter, still foretells — the declining preeminence of white, Christian America. As several studies now show, a sense of alarmed displacement among white, Christian America is the soil from which the weed of Trumpism grew.
The idea that we must “understand” those folks carries with it an implicit suggestion that in so doing, we might find some ground for compromise. It would be a great idea in normal times. But again, these times are not normal.
No compromise is possible here for a simple reason Trump followers seem to understand better than the rest of us: You can’t compromise with demography, can’t order numbers to stop being what they are and saying what they say about the coming tide of change. But what you can do is seize the levers of power and change the rules of the game in hopes of blunting the force of that tide. That — again, look at the studies — is what Trump supporters elected him to do.
So while, it is admirable to think “understanding” can fix this country, it is also naive. Progressives should ask themselves: When’s the last time you heard any Trump supporters talking about the need to understand you? You haven’t — and that ought to tell you something.
Here’s the thing: the rest of us have the moral high ground here. We see the same demographic writing on the wall that Trump followers see, but where it makes them angry and fearful, it leaves us energized. Many of us are excited to see the nation that will arise from this cauldron of change.
That’s because the idea of change doesn’t threaten us. It will challenge us, yes, but we’re ready for that. We know that this a big country, big enough for many different kinds of people, many different ways of life. We know what it means to live and let live. And we know that welcoming the stranger, caring for the stranger, is simply what you do as a human being.
I submit that those are core American virtues. And that now would be an excellent time for progressives to exhibit a little courage in their defense. Trump followers see a nation in demographic peril, so they seek a nation where those who frighten them can be regulated into irrelevance. There’s no big mystery about that. There never has been. So no, they don’t really need to be understood.
What they need to be, is defeated.
Pitts
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if Avenatti takes trump down before Mueller i'm gonna be 
in terms of historical importance the Mueller investigation is so much more important.
trump's transgressions with women of ill repute is a tale as old as time.
the Russia investigation should not play second fiddle to any other investigation, it's just too important
on so many levels.
the Russia investigation led by Mueller contains subtleties that are very reflective of our
time and contain warnings for future generations which are much more likely to prevent
our nation from being infiltrated by a foreign power rather than prevent some powerful old man from getting his dikk sucked.
in terms of historical importance the Mueller investigation is so much more important.
trump's transgressions with women of ill repute is a tale as old as time.
the Russia investigation should not play second fiddle to any other investigation, it's just too important
on so many levels.
the Russia investigation led by Mueller contains subtleties that are very reflective of our
time and contain warnings for future generations which are much more likely to prevent
our nation from being infiltrated by a foreign power rather than prevent some powerful old man from getting his dikk sucked.
iceberg_is_on_fire
Wearing Lions gear when it wasn't cool
He wants all the smoke
Redguard
Hoonding
if Avenatti takes trump down before Mueller i'm gonna be
in terms of historical importance the Mueller investigation is so much more important.
trump's transgressions with women of ill repute is a tale as old as time.
the Russia investigation should not play second fiddle to any other investigation, it's just too important
on so many levels.
the Russia investigation led by Mueller contains subtleties that are very reflective of our
time and contain warnings for future generations which are much more likely to prevent
our nation from being infiltrated by a foreign power rather than prevent some powerful old man from getting his dikk sucked.
What if Avenatti has knowledge of the pee pee tape
he's killing it.
What if Avenatti has knowledge of the pee pee tape
i don't see how he would unless he got it through the cohen investigation.
Redguard
Hoonding
I don't think he would know. Avenatti has to have something up his sleeve to be this confident.
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
Friday Night Lights...Grab a beer 
There's a bottle of Henny next to the cups
There's a bottle of Henny next to the cups
Hood Critic
The Power Circle
Who willingly talks to this dude? 