{"id":162669,"date":"2018-05-05T01:50:05","date_gmt":"2018-05-05T05:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=162669"},"modified":"2018-05-05T01:50:05","modified_gmt":"2018-05-05T05:50:05","slug":"trump-says-giuliani-needs-to-get-facts-straight-on-stormy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/05\/05\/trump-says-giuliani-needs-to-get-facts-straight-on-stormy\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump says Giuliani needs to ‘get facts straight’ on Stormy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Giuliani's<\/a>
Giuliani’s surprise revelation of the president’s payment clashed with Trump’s past statements, created new legal headaches and stunned many in the West Wing. (File photo by mark reinstein \/ Shutterstock.com)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 President Donald Trump insisted Friday that \u201cwe’re not changing any stories\u201d about the 2016 hush payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, even as he further muddied the explanation for the settlement by suggesting the new face of his legal team needs to \u201cget his facts straight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump said that Rudy Giuliani, who upended the previous White House defence this week by saying the president knew about his personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s payment to Daniels, was \u201ca great guy but he just started a day ago\u201d and said the former mayor of New York City was still \u201clearning the subject matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The president added that \u201cvirtually everything\u201d reported about the payments \u2014 which are the subject of swirling legal action and frenzied cable newsbreaks \u2014 was wrong. But he declined to elaborate.<\/p>\n

Giuliani’s surprise revelation of the president’s payment clashed with Trump’s past statements, created new legal headaches and stunned many in the West Wing. White House aides were blindsided when Giuliani said Wednesday night that the president had repaid Cohen for $130,000 that was given to Daniels to keep her quiet before the 2016 election about her allegations of an affair with Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump called the continuing news stories about Daniels \u201ccrap\u201d and said the White House would offer an accounting of the payments. But he offered no details<\/p>\n

While Giuliani said the payment to Daniels was \u201cgoing to turn out to be perfectly legal,\u201d legal experts said the new information raised a number of questions, including whether the money represented repayment of an undisclosed loan or could be seen as reimbursement for a campaign expenditure. Either could be legally problematic.<\/p>\n

Giuliani insisted Trump didn’t know the specifics of Cohen’s arrangement with Daniels until recently, telling \u201cFox & Friends\u201d on Thursday that the president didn’t know all the details until \u201cmaybe 10 days ago.\u201d Giuliani told The New York Times that Trump had repaid Cohen $35,000 a month \u201cout of his personal family account\u201d after the campaign was over. He said Cohen received $460,000 or $470,000 in all for expenses related to Trump.<\/p>\n

But no debt to Cohen was listed on Trump’s personal financial disclosure form, which was certified on June 16, 2017. Asked if Trump had filed a fraudulent form, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: \u201cI don’t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giuliani had said the payment was not a campaign finance violation, but also acknowledged that Daniels’ hushed-up allegations could have affected the campaign, saying: \u201cImagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.\u201d<\/p>\n

Questions remain about just what Trump knew and when.<\/p>\n

Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, is seeking to be released from a non-disclosure deal she signed in the days before the 2016 election to keep her from talking about a 2006 sexual encounter she said she had with Trump. She has also filed defamation suits against Cohen and Trump.<\/p>\n

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One several weeks ago, Trump said he did not know about the payment or where the money came from. In a phone interview with \u201cFox and Friends\u201d last week, however, he appeared to muddy the waters, saying that Cohen represented him in the \u201ccrazy Stormy Daniels deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sanders said Thursday that Trump \u201ceventually learned\u201d about the payment, but she did not offer details.<\/p>\n

For all the controversy Giuliani stirred up, some Trump supporters said it was wise to get the payment acknowledgement out in the open.<\/p>\n

Said former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: \u201cYou know, there’s an old saying in the law, ‘Hang a lantern on your problems.’ … So the fact is that Rudy has to go out there now and clean it up. That’s what lawyers get hired to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniels herself weighed in via Twitter, saying: \u201cI don’t think Cohen is qualified to ‘clean up’ my horse’s manure. Too soon?\u201d<\/p>\n

Her attorney, Michael Avenatti, who engaged in his own press tour Thursday, slammed both Trump and Giuliani.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe admissions by Mr. Giuliani as to Mr. Trump’s conduct and the acts of Mr. Cohen are directly contrary to the lies previously told to the American people,\u201d he said. \u201cThere will ultimately be severe consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is facing mounting legal threats from the Cohen-Daniels situation and the special counsel’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and possible co-ordination with the Trump campaign.<\/p>\n

Cohen is facing a criminal investigation in New York, and FBI agents raided his home and office several weeks ago seeking records about the Daniels nondisclosure agreement. Giuliani has warned Trump that he fears Cohen, the president’s longtime personal attorney, will \u201cflip,\u201d bending in the face of a potential prison sentence, and he has urged Trump to cut off communications with him, according to a person close to Giuliani.<\/p>\n

The president’s self-proclaimed legal fixer has been surprised and concerned by Trump’s recent stance toward him, according to a Cohen confidant. Cohen was dismayed to hear Trump marginalize his role during an interview last week with \u201cFox & Friends\u201d and interpreted a recent negative National Enquirer cover story as a warning shot from a publication that has long been cozy with Trump, said the person who was not authorized to talk about private conversations and spoke only on condition of anonymity. Cohen also had not indicated to friends that Trump’s legal team was going to contradict his original claim that he was not reimbursed for the payment to Daniels.<\/p>\n

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and\u00a0U.S.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0attorney, joined Trump’s legal team last month. He told CNN on Thursday that the announcement of Trump’s repayment of the hush money was a planned strategy, saying: \u201cYou won’t see daylight between me and the president.\u201d He was quickly backed up by Trump, who said on Twitter that he had repaid Cohen.<\/p>\n

Trump himself was happy with Giuliani’s performance, according to a person familiar with his views but not authorized to speak about them publicly. And Giuliani told The Washington Post the president was \u201cvery pleased.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jason Miller, who worked on both Trump’s and Giuliani’s presidential campaigns and remains close with both, said the fact the White House was caught off-guard was by design. He said the outside legal team was supposed to work independently of the White House, modeled on the team that defended President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not the White House’s job. This is not what they’re supposed to be worried about,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it’s good that they’re not worried about this.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 President Donald Trump insisted Friday that \u201cwe’re not changing any stories\u201d about the 2016 hush payment to porn …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":162670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24157,16],"tags":[9869,50611,50610,47765,352],"class_list":["post-162669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-american-news","category-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-porn-star","tag-rudy-giuliani","tag-stormy-daniels","tag-us","mauthors-catherine-lucey","mauthors-jonathan-lemire","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}