President Trump, in his first comments on Michael Cohen's guilty plea, claimed payments to women shouldn’t be a campaign finance issue because “they didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me."
He spoke with Fox and Friends today for an interview airing tomorrow.
Asked if he knew of the payments, he said:
“Later on I knew. Later on. But you have to understand, what he did -- and they weren’t taken out of campaign finance, that’s the big thing. That’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me. And I tweeted about it. You know, I put -- I don’t know if you know but I tweeted about the payments. But they didn’t come out of campaign. In fact, my first question when I heard about it was did they come out of the campaign because that could be a little dicey. And they didn’t come out of the campaign and that’s big."
Trump continued: “It’s not even a campaign violation.”
In a poke at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump said, “If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation but he had a different attorney general and they viewed it a lot differently.”
What Trump is talking about: Cohen pleaded guilty yesterday to eight counts. The counts against Cohen included tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump, including payments Cohen made or helped orchestrate that were designed to silence women who claimed affairs with the then-candidate.
Though not named in the plea deal filed in court, the women whom Cohen helped silence were two who have since gone public with their claims of sexual encounters or affairs with Trump: A porn star named Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels, and a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal. Trump has denied the claims.
