Trump Placed ‘In The Room’ When Plans To Quash Stories About Affairs Were Discussed
More evidence that President Trump was an active participant in the scheme to silence Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels in advance of the 2016 election.
NBC News is reporting that President Trump was in the room when his lawyer Michael Cohen and the publisher of the National Enquirer were discussing how to pay off women who were alleged to have had affairs with Trump and threatening to go public just prior to Election Day in 2016:
Donald Trump was the third person in the room in August 2015 when his lawyer Michael Cohen and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker discussed ways Pecker could help counter negative stories about Trump’s relationships with women, NBC News has confirmed.
As part of a nonprosecution agreement disclosed Wednesday by federal prosecutors, American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company, admitted that “Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”
The “statement of admitted facts” says that AMI admitted making a $150,000 payment “in concert with the campaign,” and says that Pecker, Cohen and “at least one other member of the campaign” were in the meeting. According to a person familiar with the matter, the “other member” was Trump.
Trump was first identified as attending the meeting by The Wall Street Journal.
Daniel Goldman, an NBC News analyst and former assistant U.S. attorney said the agreement doesn’t detail what Trump said and did in the meeting. “But if Trump is now in the room, as early as August of 2015 and in combination with the recording where Trump clearly knows what Cohen is talking about with regarding to David Pecker, you now squarely place Trump in the middle of a conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which investigated Cohen’s hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, declined to comment.
(…)
When Cohen pleaded guilty to arranging the payments in August, he said he had done so “at the direction” of an unnamed candidate, and that a $150,000 payment prior to the 2016 election was “for the principal purpose of influencing” the election. The meeting between Cohen, Pecker and unnamed other parties to discuss suppressing stories was referenced in the criminal information document to which Cohen pleaded guilty. The document also refers to “at least one other member of the campaign” being present.
The statement of admitted facts says that AMI’s “principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.” Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, has said the payments were made to spare Trump’s family from embarrassment.
The most interesting thing to note about this report is the timing, which indicates that Trump, Cohen, and Pecker were discussing as early as the summer of 2015, shortly after the President became a candidate for office, the manner by which AMI could help the Trump campaign keep women who might come forward to make accusations against Trump during the course of the campaign quiet. This raises the possibility, obviously, that there may have been other women in addition to McDougal and Daniels who were paid in some way to keep quiet in an effort to protect the campaign. If that is the case, then one can presume that Cohen and/or Pecker, or both, have revealed the identity of these women to Justice Department investigators and provided them with documentation with regard to any such transactions. So far, of course, only McDougal and Daniels have gone public but there have been rumors of other women out there who are under similar agreements to those signed by McDougal and Daniels who have yet to come forward.
This news comes just a day after it was reported that AMI had reached a cooperation agreement with the Justice Department under which it agreed to cooperate with the ongoing investigation into the payments that were made to McDougal and former adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep them quiet about their affairs with Trump a decade earlier. The day before that, Trump attorney and “fixer,” who was at the center of both payment arrangements, was sentenced to three years in prison in part for his admissions regarding his role in both the McDougal and Daniels payments. In that respect, the importance of this revelation cannot be understated because it is in many ways the final piece of a puzzle that has been slowly coming together for the better part of the past year.
The saga began, of course, in October 2016 when separate agreements were reached with adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal under which the women were paid $130,000 and $150,000 respectively in exchange for their silence regarding sexual relationships they had with Trump in 2006 when Melania Trump was pregnant with their son Barron. From the beginning, it was known that Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time attorney, was at the heart of both matters. With respect to the payment to Daniels, of course, Cohen was revealed to have been the source of the funds that were paid to Daniels, while the funds paid to McDougal came from AMI in the form of a scheme under which the company bought the rights to McDougal’s story with the understanding, at least on its part, that they would never be made public.
With respect to the Daniels payment, Cohen claimed at the beginning that the President was unaware of those payments and stated that the Daniels payment specifically was made without the President’s knowledge using Cohen’s personal funds, an act for which Cohen was never personally reimbursed. The President, of course, repeated these denials at least until his personal attorney Rudy Guiliani acknowledged that the President knew about the payoff to Daniels and that he had reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 that was paid to Daniels. Subsequently, recordings that Cohen had made of a conversation with Trump revealed that the then-candidate was aware of the ongoing negotiations regarding a similar payoff to McDougal. Later, Cohen admitted that he did not choose to pursue an agreement with Stormy Daniels until after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, a development that makes it far more likely that this payoff to Daniels, as well as the contemporaneous payoff to McDougal, was made to benefit the Trump campaign rather than protect the Trump marriage or shield Melania Trump from embarrassment. This made both contributions, neither one of which was authorized by or properly reported to the Federal Election Commission, violations of the law that could subject both Trump and Cohen, as well as various people involved in the Trump campaign potentially subject to both civil and criminal charges.
Cohen pled guilty to these charges in August. In his plea, he admitted that his involvement in the payments to purchase the silence of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal was done for the purpose of trying to protect the campaign in the final weeks of the election and that it was done at the direction and with the full knowledge of his boss Donald Trump. It was also revealed that there was an unnamed third-party who was part of the Trump campaign who was aware of the nature and purpose of the transaction. Given the fact that we had already heard recordings made by Cohen where he discusses the McDougal transaction with Trump and both Trump and Cohen have admitted that Trump was aware of the negotiations with Daniels at the time they were taking place. This report from NBC placing Trump in the room at the time the payoffs for both McDougal and Daniels (originally there had been plans for Daniels to be paid in a manner similar to the arrangement for McDougal, but that plan was ultimately abandoned in favor of the direct agreement that Cohen negotiated with Daniels) were discussed, and the testimony of both Cohen and American Media CEO David Pecker and Michael Cohen that the intent of the payments was to protect the campaign in the final weeks before the election,
As I said earlier this week, what all of this means is that the President of the United States was a co-conspirator with both Cohen and A.M.I. to evade and violate federal campaign finance laws, among other crimes. Were he not the President of the United States he would have most likely been indicted by now himself. Instead, we find ourselves where we are now, and where it goes from here is anyone’s guess.
All we need is for 19 or 20 Republican Senators to suddenly start caring about the country.
Yeah…not going to happen.
Trump is a criminal. That is no longer arguable. Trump is a felon.
But this is the start, not the end. Still to come: conspiracy with the Russians to steal the election, money laundering, tax evasion, corruption involving the Russians, the Saudis, the Emiratis and who knows how many others?
People thought #TrumpCrimeFamily was hyperbole. Nope. The Trump organization is a criminal organization and this is without question now, the most corrupt administration in American history. But not just corrupt – we’ve had a couple of corrupt presidencies before, but we haven’t had one where the corruption was married to so much nastiness, cruelty, racism, woman-hating, bigotry, stupidity and lies. We’ve never had anything to approach the tidal wave of lies produced by this foul little man and his gaggle of creepy relatives.
It’s funny because in the minds of the Trump cultists this was their big chance to express themselves, to show the pointy-headed intellectuals on the coasts that good ol’ ‘Murricans know better, that they aren’t just a bunch of ignorant sht-kickers. Well. That didn’t work. Thanks to Trump we coastal elites have gone from thinking ‘those people’ were just slow and ignorant to knowing they’re so fcking stupid they shouldn’t be allowed to dress themselves, and morally depraved, unpatriotic and cruel to boot. It will be a decade at least before Trump voters manage to claw their way back to ‘ignorant sht-kickers.’
I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t premeditation like a really, really, big part of a criminal case?
Consider. Dennison knew there was embarrassing information about his past behavior out there, and that it would likely come out. He then conspired with Cohen and Pecker on how to handle such things illegally as they crop up.
Intent, knowledge of the crime as a crime, premeditation. What more do you need? Breakfast in bed?
Lock him up.
So tired of seeing stormy daniels pictures every day for the last two years. We can skip those anytime you like.
@Michael Reynolds: You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.
The feds have AMI and whatever is in AMI’s Trump “safe”.
I’m long on popcorn futures.
@Teve:
I kinda like Stormy. She seems smart and funny and savvy.
Back in 2000, or thereabouts, someone asked Trump if he’d run for president. He said he’d like to do so, and then added, “But the women…”
@de stijl: The coverups of sleazy cheating trump did are enough, but the russian and middle eastern money is going to be more substantial. Trump’s people didn’t give a shit about the GOP platform at all except one little thing–change this thing over here about russia, will ya? Oh, scuse me, gotta take a fundraising call: “Tovarisch, Buddy, Comrade!”
not taking money from foreign governments is literally written into the constitution that shitmonkeys like Hatch, Santorum, and McConnell claim to revere.
@de stijl: I don’t have any problem with her. I’m just tired of having to see her every day I want to go to a news site.
I use stylebot to block the main images but then i still get previews half the time.
@Teve:
That whole deal how the Trump handlers wanted just one change to the platform and that change favored Russian interests over Ukraine’s was odd. And potentially telling.
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/04/568310790/2016-rnc-delegate-trump-directed-change-to-party-platform-on-ukraine-support
It looks like Pay For Play quid pro quo.
Kellyanne was just on Trump State Media Corp and said that calling Trump a liar was a slur. A little history:
– Trump was asked if he knew about the payments. He answered unequivocally, “No”.
– When that collapsed he changed it up: He knew about the payments but only later, after they had occurred.
– When that collapsed he changed it again: He discussed it with Michael Cohen at the time, but that Cohen did it on his own and what looked like a reimbursement was just a normal retainer he paid Cohen. Note that this can in no way be squared with his first two alibis.
– When that collapsed he pivoted to: it was a private payment and perfectly legal and since he paid it under the advice of Michael Cohen, a lawyer, if it was illegal it was all Cohen’s fault. Note again that this cannot be squared in any way with the first three alibis.
– And now, with this revelation, what will he say next? That he personally thanked Pecker for helping with the campaign but he didn’t know that could be considered a campaign donation?
@Teve:
I had to go off and watch the clip. My morning laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg Cleavon Little is so clearly trying not to laugh till his cue.
@Michael Reynolds:
@Teve:
Reynolds, you sneaky fast bastard! You beat me to it!
I love how Cleavon is trying so hard not to crack up and Wilder is whispering profound nonsense directly into his ear. How much of Wilder’s speech was scripted vs. improvised?
@de stijl:
Not me.
Everybody knows Trump himself ordered these women paid off and had “his people” do the dirty work. What are we supposed to do with this information? Muster up more outrage?
@CSK:
Howard Stern?
@James Pearce:
Trump publicly denied paying off Daniels in April of this year.
@MarkedMan:
Right. But calling reporters “enemies of the people” is just telling it like it is.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/every-contradictory-thing-trump-said-about-stormy-daniels.html
Yeah, it’s The Intelligencer, but this article is 90% straight quotes.
@CSK: One of Margaret Truman’s Murder at books (think it was The Watergate, but can’t remember) had a comment from one of the characters that Trump might consider running for President except he was germaphobic. The two people conversing laughed about someone who doesn’t like to shake hands on the campaign trail. e
Turns out the idea wasn’t a far fetched as people thought it was at the time.
ETA: on liars and slurs–taken from another perspective, I can see her point, lots of really good liars that I’ve known would never try to do what Trump does. He’s waaaaay worse than a mere liar. And incompetent at that.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It is odd and fascinating and chilling watching the old Howard Stern interviews with Trump.
It’s kind of sad that there most of the Trumpers on this site faded away. I realized it when, on another thread, someone quoted a Trumper from more than a year ago. Sure, it was naive and stupid, but there was a real effort in it. Now we get Guarneri showing up to grunt and tell the kids to get off his lawn, 1 American spouting an incoherent phrase or two, and on this thread Pearce can’t muster up the enthusiasm to go beyond “But the payoffs to porn stars will never lead to anything” – little more than hours after the Presidents personal lawyer was sentenced to three years in jail for paying off porn stars at the President’s behest. C’mon Pearce, can’t you even give us an “But you are all playing into his master plan!”?
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
There are two ways of looking at this. In a sense Trump is a very bad liar, because he’s so cartoonishly over-the-top. He isn’t smooth, he has no idea how to mislead in subtle ways. What he has going for him is (a) his cult of personality where a large segment of the public will automatically believe anything that comes out of his mouth, no matter how absurd, contradictory, or just plain bizarre (b) the right-wing media that helps defend and amplify his lies, often in a far more sophisticated manner than he’s capable.
Put another way, he’d get slaughtered in a game of poker–unless he was playing against MAGA morons with Hannity blaring in their ear what cards he wasn’t holding.
@de stijl:
In watching these, I realized that Trump has become remarkably less mentally agile since these videos were shot. He’s obviously an appallingly douchey human being by his own statements in these vids, but he is not dumb and is a fairly agile interlocutor.
@de stijl:
There is an associate producer from the Celebrity Apprentice who claims Trump was abusing Adderall back then. It’s hard to know if he was being serious because he seemed to be doing some kind of half funny monologue and people were laughing. But I’ve maintained for a while that there is very good circumstantial evidence that Trump is messed up on prescription medication. Aside from his affinity for very sketchy doctors there is his odd sniffing and manic behavior, wild mood swings, and inability to sleep.
@MarkedMan: I just made a very similar comment on the Kyl thread. Trump’s not losing numerical support, he’s losing intensity of support. Because instead of Winning! Winning! Winning! It’s Bumbling Crime! Bumbling Crime! Bumbling Crime!
It only took 100+ proven links to Russians, dozens of indictments, thousands of bald Trump lies, and a dozen guilty pleas for it to start to penetrate.
@Kylopod:
Is obvious BS bluster technically lying? Cassius Clay / Mohammed Ali was the master of bluster.
@Teve: That’s a good analysis. I mean, there is still the hard core that believe he masterfully negotiated with North Korea, that the new Nafta deal is better than the old one, and that the wall is mostly built. But let’s face it, those same people believe professional wrestling is a legitimate sport. For the most part though, the Trumpers have gone from “You are all losers who don’t understand his incredible genius!” to “But Hillary would have been no better”. Note – Yes, she would. Much, much better. Even people who think Clinton would have been a disaster believe she would have passed that very very low bar.
@de stijl:
Ali knew he was smoking you, knew that you knew it, and knew that you knew that he knew. A couple of years ago someone (whose name escapes me) who was on the same circuit as Trump back in the 80’s and 90’s commented on how different he was from back then. He specifically said that in those days he was playing you and knew that you knew, and was constantly checking to make sure you got how clever he was. I think the quote was something like “Back then he was in on the joke, and wanted to make sure you were too. Now, he’s just the joke.”
@de stijl:
It wasn’t Stern. It was a tv interview, I think. It was interesting that he acknowledged back then that all that bragging he’d done about his conquests could come back to haunt him.
@MarkedMan:
Adderall is essentially speed. I’ve known meth heads. Never, ever trust what a speeder say – they will say anything. Crank is bad news.
Meth kills your brain and quickly transforms you into a garbage human. Not as fast as huffing, but close enough.
This is rank speculation, but I doubt that Trump is a 20 year Adderall user/abuser. 20 years of speed makes you into someone barely capable of feeding yourself if you’re lucky enough to be alive at that point. But there are functional addicts and a billion dollars buys a lot of handlers.
@MarkedMan:
It was part of a comedy set on Dec 1st. Youtube of the set
Kurt Eichenwald also tweeted in August 2017 about Trump having abused amphetamine derivatives from 1982 – 1990 and published a longer piece this past March
@de stijl:
So?
@MarkedMan:
Bah. You think I’m over here pumping up Trump as some kind of genius? Geniuses don’t entangle themselves with women like this, especially geniuses in their 60s.
Trump isn’t a genius. He’s just lucky. He’s lucky that the Republicans are so hollow and the Democrats so weak.
@MarkedMan:
My brain hurts homie. Took me three tries but I eventually got it.
@MarkedMan: I think it was Mark Cuban saying something like that, although I can’t quickly find evidence of that.
@James Pearce:
Bye, Felicia.
DJIA down 500+ again.
Since Trump’s tariffs kicked in, the markets are down about 4% overall, roughly.
@James Pearce: Bah.
OK I’ll break my rule here and reply. No. No, I don’t think you are pumping up Trump any more. That was my point. You used to come on here and tell us how we shouldn’t be talking about Trump’s latest travesty because we were being played by a genius. That was your schtick. Now you just tell us to ignore his travesties, well, just because. I get it. You used to be fighting the good fight, coming here and working in stealth mode to support your man. Now even you know he’s just a stinking turd and so your life sucks. But you still hate those of us who knew from the beginning that your man was a complete loser, so you still show up and swat your arms around once in awhile but I can tell your heart isn’t in it. Sucks to be a Trumper.
@Teve:
Not happy about it short-term but this needs to happen. US markets were overvalued. A contraction is way overdue. Hopefully, it’s short, sharp shock. Plus some idjit decided we should have a trade war with China and Canada.
Not ever going to tell someone how to invest, but cash equivalents are boring but stable and are relatively immune to mishegas.
@de stijl:
Dude, stow that misogynistic crap right now. It’s not going to be that easy to get rid of me.
Bye Felicia (8 seconds)
https://youtu.be/bT90D0GKZRM
And then you link it!
I’m getting bored of the porn stars. I want new, better scandals.
I mean, of all the many, many Trump scandals, *this* is the one that lasts the longest and is the most public? I understand that that sex sells, but this is weird mushroom sex. No one wants to think about that.
I kind of like the latest defense — he had a terrible lawyer who didn’t tell him this was illegal (and it wasn’t illegal, and he didn’t do it anyway, and Cohen plead guilty for crimes for funsies and maybe the free healthcare) — but mostly, I’m bored of it.
How do conservatives keep their rage and anger up for so long?
@Teve: I don’t mind the pictures.
Looks like Trump is the “man in the middle”
“islands in the stream”
@MarkedMan:
Let me be more clear then…
You want to get rid of Trump? Quit focusing on his travesties and focus on your own. Scandal may take Trump down, but no scandal will make modern progressivism look good.
@James Pearce: Yeah sure Pearce.
OK, I’m done
@MarkedMan: Hear, hear! And a cogent analysis.
@de stijl:
I’ll keep saying it… I’ve been in Cash since late Jan/early Feb. All cash. Missed a big run up, but I was happy with a 43% gain in three years, and haven’t lost anything.
I’ll wait until it gets below 23,500 to jump back in, slowly. But if it doesn’t hold the 23,500 support from March 2018, there is nothing keeping the market from sliding all the way down to right around 16,000, which was a triple bottom in 2015/2016. That should be a firm price point to really jump back in big time.
Just my opinion and should not be taken as investment advice.
@Gustopher: You got your wish!
The newest scandal is that Ivanka was in the middle of charging substantial markups to the Trump DC hotel during inauguration. Yep! They overcharged their own (registered as a nonprofit) inaugural committee for renting space in the Trump hotel. Not a few bucks either. Substantially over the going market rate. Also, apparently $40 million is just flat-out missing.
These people are criminals through and through.
@James Pearce:
What exactly is your beef with ‘modern progressivism?’ And what about it do you think is worse than massive corruption?
You’re getting close to actually taking a stand, Pearce, go ahead, jump in the deep end. Is it the women or the gays or the trans people you’ve got a beef with?
@Michael Reynolds: Maybe you’re onto Mr P’s secret: He’s into ANCIENT progressivism. He’s a Bullmoose party guy!
@de stijl:
Except that Ali could back it up.
@MarkedMan:
Are ya really though?
@Michael Reynolds:
Where to start? The preference for activism over enterprise? Whenever some activist wants to build a tiny house village for the homeless and the city says no, when you know damn well that if some developer came in wanting to build luxury condos, the city would not only say yes, but say, here’s some tax breaks to help you out. That’s modern progressivism to me. Building tiny houses on vacant lots, thinking you’re changing the world. Build something bigger, and you might.
@James Pearce:
Wow, that was really vacuous.
I remember when James told us all that he was a moderate Democrat that was just concerned for his party and country, or some crap like that.
Today, we see that James has just completely lost his schtick and his mind.
As goes James, so goes the GOP, as we can’t keep up with newer and newer stories of corruption and lies.
Bye James.
(and “Bye Felecia” is not misogynist. In the film “Friday” was a dismissal of a crackhead that added no value and continued to attempt to borrow money. It is a way to shut it down.)
@Michael Reynolds:
You don’t want the whole manifesto, Michael. It’s not very generous to guys like you.
@Liberal Capitalist:
As each day goes by, I find myself less and less sympathetic to the Democrats. I’m unaffiliated so I don’t have to rush out and change parties, but don’t look to me to carry any water.
(And yes, “Bye Felecia” is misogynist. Go say it to any random woman you encounter today…then duck.)
@James Pearce:
Oh shut up, you don’t have a manifesto, Pearce, you’re just pissy. There’s nothing beyond vague pissiness. Did some hipster chick barista shoot you down, is that it? You don’t belong at the adult table, you don’t do the work.