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Donald Trump has been operating as if nothing he did could ever have any legal consequences, but Stormy Daniels’s 60 Minutes interview added new layers to the possible legal jeopardy Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, face for covering up his affair with Daniels. Daniels’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, bolstered the case that Cohen’s 2016 pre-election payment of $130,000 to Daniels was directly related to the Trump Organization—not only did he arrange for the payment using his Trump Organization email address, but Daniels’s signed agreement was returned to Cohen at his Trump Tower office.
But Cohen’s payment as a campaign finance violation isn't the only potential criminal issue here, the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s Norman Eisen and Virginia Canter write:
A second possibly criminal danger for Trump stems from his omission of any Stormy-related information on his 2017 financial disclosure forms. Under federal ethics law, Trump is required to disclose any assets that exceed $1,000 and liabilities that exceed $10,000. He certified that the statements made in the report were “true, complete and correct to the best of my knowledge.” If done knowingly and willfully, any materially false statement on the form may result in up to five years in prison.
Can anyone have any serious doubt after hearing Daniels talk about their relationship that the president was the true beneficiary of the nondisclosure agreement? Or that its fair market value was far more than $1,000? The agreement is worth at least the $130,000 that was paid for it — and likely a lot more to the media organizations that would have bid on Daniels' story
The truism that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” isn’t always accurate—if Special Counsel Robert Mueller finds Trump colluded with Russia, for instance, that would outweigh the cover-up by a lot—but in this case, it’s absolutely true. Team Trump, led by Cohen, took a decade-old consensual affair and turned it into a significant legal problem for Trump.