Giuliani: Trump Knew About Stormy Daniels Payment
The newly appointed head of President Donald Trump’s legal team and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani revealed Wednesday that the president repaid attorney Michael Cohen for the $130,000 payment to adult film star Stephanie Clifford, more commonly known as Stormy Daniels.
During a Wednesday evening appearance on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Giuliani said he was “giving you a fact now that you don’t know,” by explaining how the payment to Daniels was handled.
“It turned out to be perfectly legal,” Giuliani said. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign fiance violation.”
The money to repay Cohen had been “funneled through the law firm and the president repaid it,” Giuliani explained.
Giuliani said that when he first heard about the payment, he was confident it wasn’t paid for by the campaign.
“I knew how much Donald Trump put into that campaign. I said ‘$130,000?’ He’s going to do a couple of checks for a $130,000.”
Cohen and the president had previously claimed that Trump was not aware of the payment. However, Giuliani said Trump did know that it occurred, but wasn’t aware of all the details.
“He didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know,” Giuliani said. “But he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this for my clients. I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.”
Giuliani’s also spoke about the raid of Cohen’s hotel room and office by the FBI last month, calling it an “outrageous violation of attorney client privilege.”
See the full interview below: (Comments on the Stormy Daniels’ case begin around the 29 minute mark.)
On Thursday morning, President Trump wrote several tweets expounding on Giuliani’s statements, making clear that the payments made to Cohen were through a private retainer, not from campaign funds.
Giuliani affirmed Trump’s tweets on “Fox and Friends” on Thursday.
“I don’t think there’s any contradiction of that. That’s what I said last night,” Giuliani said of Trump’s tweets. “He didn’t know the details of this until we knew the details of it… maybe 10 days ago.”
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