It’s not helping his situation that POTUS* is interviewed by someone who believes that the US defeated “communist Japan” in WW2. Womp Womp. Shades of the Lester Holt interview.
The president appeared on the show after his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges, including campaign finance violations. Cohen claimed in court that he arranged payments to two women who alleged they had affairs with Trump at the direction of the now-president.
While the full interview will not air until Thursday, a short clip released from Fox News showed Trump telling co-host Ainsley Earhardt that he knew about the payments.
“Later on I knew, later on, but you have to understand, Ainsley, what he did, and they weren’t taken out of campaign finance—that’s a much bigger thing, did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign,” Trump said during the interview.
"The striking thing about the video we just watched is that the president in his usual clumsy way has stumbled into another federal crime,"
Norm Eisen said, claiming that Trump signed his federal financial disclosures in 2017 and purposefully omitted his debt to Cohen for paying off women who claimed to have had affairs with the president .
"Guess what, if you owe somebody money, he just said 'yes, I know about the payments,' he repaid Michael Cohen. He had to list that on his form. He omitted it," Eisen continued. The ethics expert said that his watchdog group Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has already made a criminal referral against Trump, which has resulted in a complaint from the Office of Government Ethics to the Department of Justice.
"President Trump just stumbled right into that second federal offense. So we’re seeing, it may not be the beginning of the end but it’s the end of the beginning," he added.
www.newsweek.com/...
and on today’s Fox News air….
“I think that if Donald Trump wasn’t president and didn’t have those Justice Department guidelines, there’s a good chance he would have been indicted yesterday as co-coconspirator in this and a lot of legal experts think that’s the case,” Harf said. “Also, take a step back, John Edwards was brought to trial over something very similar with less evidence.”
Thursday, Aug 23, 2018 · 8:48:20 PM +00:00
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annieli
Trump claimed he only knew about the payments “later on.” But mere seconds later, Trump also said the payments didn’t come from the campaign, “they came from me.”
Trump is apparently trying to have his cake and eat it too by trying to suggest that Cohen’s payments weren’t illegal while also maintaining his distance from them.
The indictment lays out that Cohen personally made the payment to Daniels for the purpose of keeping her story about having an affair with Trump out of the election. Because $130,000 far exceeds what can be legally contributed to a presidential campaign, it was a clear campaign finance violation.
Trump seems to believe that because he personally reimbursed Cohen, that somehow ameliorates what was illegal about Cohen’s payment. New documents show that Trump’s real estate company authorized reimbursing Cohen for the payment to Daniels in February 2017, after he’d already taken office. There’s thus no way the money came from Trump in 2016, and it likewise makes no sense that Trump made a payment but simultaneously didn’t know about it. Either way, he’s lying.
Despite Trump’s increasing willingness to take ownership of the payments, the White House continues to deny that Trump had an affair with either woman.
thinkprogress.org/...