Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen is scheduled to start a three-year prison term in just 16 days, after his having pled guilty to lying in testimony about the “hush money” payment he made on Trump’s behalf—and at Trump’s direction—to AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 election, to keep Daniels quiet about her sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
But on Friday, 13-term Maryland congressional Rep. Elijah Cummings, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, said in a letter to the White House, that other Trump lawyers also lied to the government about the Daniels payoff—and that Trump himself personally signed an official document that contained falsehoods about the hush money.
Cohen made the payment to Daniels himself, and Trump, after initially denying any knowledge of the payment, later admitted that he reimbursed Cohen for the payoff.
Cohen pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution with the payoff, as USA Today explained, because the cover-up of Trump’s sexual dalliance with Daniels was designed “to protect Trump's election chances,” and the $130,000 sum far exceeded the legal $2,700 limit for an individual campaign contribution.
But the cover-up did not end with Cohen, Cummings now alleges, naming Sheri Dillon and Stefan Passantino as two Trump lawyers who may have lied to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) about Trump’s indebtedness to Cohen, according to a Politico report.
“This raises significant questions about why some of the president’s closest advisers made these false claims and the extent to which they too were acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, the president,” Cummings wrote in the letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipillone.
Cummings said in the letter that the new allegations of lying by Trump’s lawyers are based on “internal notes by OGE officials” recently obtained by the Oversight Committee.
Cummings also noted that in July of 2017, Trump filed his financial disclosure form with the OGE, signed by himself, swearing that information on the form was “true, complete, and correct.” But the form contained no mention of Trump’s debt to Cohen for the Daniels payment, made in October of 2016, even though Trump was aware that he was in the process of paying the money back to Cohen.
Trump’s lawyers continued to lie about Trump’s debt to Cohen for the Daniels hush money between March 22 and April 26 of 2018, according to Cummings' letter.
But the game was up just days later when, on March 2, another Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, appeared in a televised interview and revealed that Trump had, in fact, reimbursed Cohen for the cash that was “funneled” to Daniels, and that the reimbursement was made in the form of a “retainer” over “several months.”
Photo by Edward Kimmel/Wikimedia Commons
