Trump gloats as Stormy Daniels hush-money probe is dropped after case ‘built on lies’ from ‘sleazebag’ Michael Cohen
DONALD Trump gloated after a probe into his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels was formally dropped by investigators on Thursday.
In a post on his website, Trump called the case “phony” and “built on lies from Michael Cohen, a corrupt and convicted lawyer.”
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) dropped the investigation into Trump in a closed-door meeting back in February and officially announced its decision yesterday.
The probe was spurred amid allegations Trump directed his then-attorney Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000 on the eve of the 2020 election to keep quiet about her relationship with the former president.
The payment was cited as a potential violation of election law. The sum was also in excess of the legal limit for individual contributions and was never reported on Trump’s campaign filings.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 for violating campaign finance laws.
He went on the record to say the “hush money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump.”
However, Trump never faced any legal consequences over the payment and he celebrated the FEC’s decision in a statement issued on his blog page, From The Desk of Donald Trump, on Friday.
“The Federal Election Commission in Washington, D.C., has totally dropped the phony case against me concerning payments to women relative to the 2016 Presidential Election.
“It was a case built on lies from Michael Cohen, a corrupt and convicted lawyer, a lawyer in fact who was so corrupt he was sentenced to three years in jail for lying to Congress and many other things having nothing to do with me.”
Trump went on to thank the FEC for their decision and for “ending this chapter of Fake News.
“Between two sleazebag lawyers, Michael Avenatti and Michael Cohen, we were all able to witness law and justice in our Country at its lowest!”, he concluded.
Cohen, meanwhile, criticized the FEC, telling the New York Times: “Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the F.E.C. committee could rule any other way is confounding.”
In December 2020, the FEC’s Office of General Counsel issued an internal report saying that there was “reason to believe” that Cohen and the Trump campaign violated the campaign finance law “knowingly and willfully”.
But the commission – split evenly between three Republicans and three Democratic-aligned commissioners – failed by a vote of 2-2 to prove the allegations of violations.
The vote’s outcome was revealed by the body on Thursday. Independent Steven Walther did not vote and Republican Allen Dickerson recused himself, according to CNN.
The panel’s Republican commissioners, James Trainor and Sean Cooksey, who voted to dismiss the case released a statement saying the matter was “not the best use of agency resources.”
“The public record is complete with respect to the conduct at issue in these complaints, and Mr. Cohen has been punished by the government of the United States for the conduct at issue in these matters,” they said.
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Democratic commissioners, Shana Broussard and Ellen Weintraub, in a separate statement, said the investigation should have continued after the general counsel said there was reason to believe campaign finance law was broken.
“There is ample evidence in the record to support the finding that Trump and the Committee knew of, and nonetheless accepted, the illegal contributions at issue here,” they wrote.
“To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10- year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality.”