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Philip Bump
A national correspondent is largely focused on the numbers behind the policy
President Trump has long argued that he has not engaged in extramarital affairs with adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Moreover, he knew nothing about the payments intended to keep the two women silent before the 2016 campaign. His insistence on these fronts, which was already collapsing following the confession under oath of his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is eroded almost entirely on Friday after the publication of a long report from the Wall Street Journal.
Our strongest understanding of the interactions between Trump, Cohen and the parent company of National Enquirer, American Media Inc., comes from the criminal disclosure document submitted to the court when Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts of campaign and financial crimes. July. Completing the blanks in this document outlines what the paper reports: an agreement between Trump's team and AMI's CEO to help protect Trump's presidential campaign from control. Daniels and McDougal organized two separate AMI proceedings with Cohen. Each woman received more than $ 100,000 to remain silent about her alleged relationship with Trump.
Beyond some other details, things were murky. Determining the most important issue – has Trump violated the campaign finance law by its involvement in payments? – depended in part on details that were still missing in the story. Cohen implicated Trump on hearing his guilty pleas, but there were still shadows. The magazine's report adds new details that reinforce Trump's guilt argument.
This is what Lawrence Noble, a former Advocate General of the Federal Election Commission, spoke to the Washington Post by telephone and email on Friday. To prove a violation of the campaign finance rules in this situation should have included, in Noble's terms, the following evidence:
- That money has been poured to protect the countryside.
- That the money exceeded the limit of campaign contributions of $ 2,700.
- That the money came from a prohibited source such as a corporation.
- And / or that the contribution has not been correctly declared.
- That the violation was conscious and voluntary.
To prove that they were "conscious and willful," said Noble, they must demonstrate to Trump that he was aware of the scheme and that he knew, in general, that the behavior was illegal. ".
Let's see the new details included in this review report from this perspective. The report contains dozens of people and various legal documents. It probably includes information from three people who cooperated with federal investigators. Incidentally, this is David Pecker, Managing Director of AMI, Allen Weisselberg, Chief Financial Officer of Trump Organization, and Cohen.
Trump has launched the request to AMI and Pecker to help manage the interference. The paper reports that Trump had started the conversation with Pecker in August 2015 on how AMI could help him in his campaign.
Trump and Pecker were longtime friends before that year. AMI staff members told the Associated Press in August that Pecker was buying and killing (ie not publishing) bad stories about Trump for at least a decade. HuffPost reported last month that AMI staff members were encouraged to write stories about Trump's political opponents and to minimize or avoid stories that presented Trump in a negative light.
Before making the McDougal payment, Pecker spoke to an electoral law expert. Pecker seems to have understood that by paying the women during the campaign, he risked violating the federal law on campaign finance. As we reported for the first time in July, you are not allowed to coordinate with a candidate to spend tens of thousands of dollars on his campaign. If you could *, it would be pointless to legislate campaign finance because candidates could simply ask wealthy supporters to spend money where it is needed.
The McDougal Accord, unlike Daniels, provided for McDougal to appear on magazine covers and write for AMI publications. That, Pecker seems to have been informed by his lawyer, offering enough protection to the company for the conclusion of the agreement.
But that may not have been the case. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts in the month of August. One comes from his role of helping AMI make the payment to McDougal.
Pecker hesitated to be reimbursed because he did not want to violate the electoral law. After the public recording of Trump and Cohen 's recording of the McDougal accord, one of the many questions that came up was why the couple were planning to pay back his expenses in Pecker. The conversation between Trump and Cohen implied that they were afraid that the AMI would tell McDougal's story if Pecker had been hit by a truck – according to Trump's wording – so buy the story and retaining it internally would provide some protection.
The plan had been to accept Trump's refund for the entire payment, with the exception of $ 25,000, value of McDougal's covers and columns. According to the newspaper's lawyer, however, Pecker said a "refund" would undermine any argument that McDougal's payment was made for editorial and commercial reasons, rather than as a campaign contribution in kind.
Daniels was paid by Cohen personally because Pecker passed and Trump stalled. Another issue that emerged was why Cohen was going to tap into his own finances to pay Daniels after entering into an agreement with her in October 2016.
The Journal reports that Pecker refused to engage in this deal because "he did not want his company to pay a porn star". That, it seems, was a step too far for the magazine that reinforced Trump by accusing Sen's father Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) Of being linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. AMI did indeed connect Daniels' lawyer to Cohen, as the criminal information document specifies.
Why did not Trump pay Daniels himself? Cohen, in collaboration with Weisselberg, Trump Organization's CFO, has been trying to find a way to protect the payment of any connection with Trump. This effort delayed the payment and, while Daniels would have told his story at another point of sale, Cohen pulled money from his home equity line of credit to make the payment. (This line of credit, he admitted in August, was fraudulently obtained.)
The urgency of this payment has been heightened during a three-way conversation between Cohen, Pecker and Dylan Howard, a New York-based AMI leader, reports the Journal.
Trump himself was involved directly in every transaction. Trump reportedly called Pecker after AMI informed Cohen of McDougal's story. Cohen returned to Trump again in October 2016, when the story of Daniels was published. Trump would have told him to "do what's necessary."
All these points, these new details, reinforce the idea that Trump himself was involved in a violation of the campaign finance law, according to Noble.
"In order for the candidate to be found liable for a violation, you must generally demonstrate that he was specifically involved in the violation and that he was aware of the violation," Noble said. "When you can demonstrate that the candidate was aware of the violation or the activity that caused it – and especially when you can demonstrate that he did it to prevent that it does not seem like a violation – so I think you have some evidence. that the candidate was involved and that the candidate can be held responsible. "
He cited several examples above.
This Trump would have initiated the relationship with AMI based on the campaign: "He is a candidate. And he's doing it for election-related purposes – and I think the evidence is very strong that he was, so he's personally responsible for that, "Noble said.
That the payments for burying the stories unfolded at a distance from Trump, protecting him from a connection with them with an apparent awareness of the need to keep them secret: "When someone makes an effort to hide what he's doing in the context of a campaign," he said, "it's at least proof that it's a good thing to do it." they knew it was illegal … The mere fact of trying to hide transactions suggests that you knew it was illegal. "In other words, it denotes a will.
This Pecker has decided not to accept Trump's refund, as this would pose a risk for AMI: "My first reaction (…) was, well, proof that they knew it was a violation of the law," Noble said. "They knew they were paying to shut her up." When the registration was released, Noble told The Post that the coordination between the campaign and AMI would undermine the defense of expenses as business-related. The review's report makes it clear that this was not the case.
"What the article does is fill in a lot of lines claiming that Trump was actually specifically involved in these deals," Noble said. to come out of an argument that it is related to the campaign. "And, therefore, illegal.
The Journal included the thoughts of Rick Hasen, an expert in electoral law at the University of California at Irvine. According to the Journal, Hasen argued that Trump's participation in the payments would not necessarily involve it.
In a private post with The Post on Twitter, Hasen emphasized the importance of proving that payments were campaign-related, which he told us in March. But since then, an additional point has suggested that payments were linked: Cohen's guilty plea. That, says Hasen, was "proof" that the payments were tied to the campaign.
The Review's report reinforces much of the rest of Noble's five-part standard to demonstrate a violation.
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