Stormy Daniels beat Trump at his own game
The president who boasted of treating women like sex objects is being outplayed at his own tabloid-warfare game by a porn star. Maybe there’s justice in the world after all.
You might have missed it in the ceaseless fusillade of news, but on Wednesday the White House all but confirmed the story that actress and director Stormy Daniels is dying to tell: Shortly before the election she was paid $130,000 in hush money to keep quiet about an “intimate relationship” she had with Donald Trump in 2006, soon after Melania Trump gave birth to the couple’s son, Barron.
Daniels filed a lawsuit Tuesday arguing that she should be free to speak about the affair, since a nondisclosure agreement laying out the terms of the payment was never actually signed by Trump. Asked about the payment at a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump denies the allegations and that, in any event, “this case has already been won in arbitration.” She later added that “the arbitration was won in the president’s favor.”
Trump was reportedly “very unhappy” with Sanders’s performance, but come on, give her a break. How is she supposed to keep all the lies straight as they multiply, overlap and at times contradict? She’s good at it, but every once in a while, a little truth is bound to slip out.
What she inconveniently seemed to confirm is that Trump is a party to arbitration proceedings regarding a nondisclosure agreement involving Daniels. Obviously, there would be no such agreement unless there were something Trump wanted to hide. And if Daniels’s silence was worth $130,000, it must have been something Trump really wanted to hide.
The Daniels affair is of more than just prurient interest: It would appear that Trump may have violated federal campaign law by failing to disclose the payment on his reporting forms.
Any attempt by Trump to stick to his blanket denial — he claims all the women who say he harassed them, assaulted them or had affairs with them are lying — is now moot in the Daniels case, because in an appendix to her lawsuit she included the entire nondisclosure agreement. The filings offer a glimpse of how Trump is accustomed to operating — and suggest why special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has reportedly taken an interest in Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stormy-daniels-beat-trump-at-his-own-game/2018/03/08/396f2efe-231d-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html?utm_term=.57ea988da7c9&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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