For the first time since the story of Stormy Daniels' alleged affair with Donald Trump and the $130,000 hush money payoff to keep her quiet about it broke on January 12, when the allegations were reported by The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump has posted a message to his Twitter account commenting on the Daniels case.
Trump had tweeted a total of 611 times since January 12, including that day when the Journal ran its initial story. But he had not mentioned any aspect of the Daniels story or allegations on Twitter at all — until Wednesday morning, when he took to his Twitter account to ridicule a forensic sketch released Tuesday by Daniels and her lawyer, a sketch of a man Daniels says threatened her to stop talking about Trump back in 2011.
But Trump dismissed the sketch as “a total con job.”
Daniels released the sketch, which may be viewed at this link, during a live interview on the ABC-TV program The View on Tuesday morning.
“A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” Trump wrote in his Wednesday tweet.
Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, responded on his own Twitter feed less than a half-hour later, blasting Trump as “completely unhinged.”
“In my experience, there is nothing better in litigation than having a completely unhinged, undisciplined opponent who is prone to shooting himself in the foot. Always leads to BIGLY problems…like new claims (i.e. defamation). LOL. #xmas #hanukkah #basta,” Avenatti wrote.
Avenatti, who announced a $100,000 reward for “credible information” leading to an identification of the man in the sketch, said on Tuesday that he would increase that reward to $131,000 — a figure that seemed designed to mock the $130,000 payoff to Daniels from Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to Daniels just days before the 2016 presidential election.
Daniels will appear on the cover, and in a nude photo spread, in the upcoming issue of Penthouse Magazine, to be released on May 8. According to advance information about the interview accompanying the Daniels photo spread, she will announce that she plans to donate the $130,000 she received from Cohen to Planned Parenthood, in the names of Cohen and Trump.
Daniels alleges that in 2011, when she was contemplating making a public revelation of her Trump affair story, the man depicted in the sketch approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot as she tended to her infant daughter in her car — threatening her to back off her allegations about Trump.
“That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom,” the man said, according to Daniels in her View interview. He then told her to leave Trump alone and forget about her story.
At the time, Trump was not officially a presidential candidate. However, he was publicly musing about a run for president in the 2012 election and at least one poll showed that if he had, in fact, declared his candidacy at that time, Trump would have instantly become the Republican frontrunner to oppose President Barack Obama, who would run for a second term.
Trump was also the most public and vociferous advocate of the “birther” conspiracy theory during 2011 — the debunked belief that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore not legally eligible to hold the office of President.
Photos: Wikimedia Commons / ABC TV Screen Capture
