new york stories on the good boat, sub rosa:
Trump was trying to delay payment until after the election because by then he wouldn’t need her silence — and wouldn’t need to pay her.
Similarly, Columbia University allows the NYPD to remove students from Hamilton Hall at night to reduce conflict. 100 people arrested and encampment cleared.
The ninth day of the New York state case concluded with Keith Davidson — the Los Angeles lawyer who once represented adult-film actress Stormy Daniels — still on the stand. He spent hours detailing how each of the hush money payments to Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal were brokered. In his telling, all negotiations flowed through the National Enquirer and Cohen, then Trump’s attorney.
Davidson, the Los Angeles lawyer, testified that Daniels’s story about a sexual tryst years earlier with Trump was not considered particularly valuable.
After The Washington Post revealed in October 2016 that Trump had made offensive comments in a hot mic moment on “Access Hollywood,” Daniels’s account became important, Davidson said.
Suddenly, the interest “reached a crescendo,” Davidson testified.
In private texts, Davidson texted a National Enquirer editor to say Trump’s campaign was doomed because of the “Access Hollywood” tape. The editor replied that Daniels’s account going public could be “the final nail in the coffin.”
So in the days after The Post reporting of the tape, Daniels’s manager contacted that editor at the National Enquirer, triggering the deal with Cohen at the heart of this criminal indictment.