Official: Trump lawyers gave false info on hush money

WASHINGTON — Federal ethics officials believe President Donald Trump’s lawyers provided false information about the $130,000 payment to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels after she alleged she had sex with Trump, the chairman of the House oversight committee said Friday.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, said internal documents from the Office of Government Ethics described that Trump’s personal lawyer, Sheri Dillon, and former White House attorney Stefan Passantino provided false information about the payment.

In a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Cummings requested the White House turn over documents as part of the committee’s investigation into whether Trump failed to properly report the payments as campaign expenditures. Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations connected to the payments. He said Trump personally directed him to make them.

The Trump Organization paid Cohen $420,000 in monthly installments of $35,000 throughout 2017, after Cohen sought reimbursement for the hush-money payment to Daniels and other expenses, according to court documents. Prosecutors alleged he used “sham” invoices to try to conceal the true nature of the payments.

Cohen previously said the Trump Organization didn’t reimburse him for the payments, while Trump has said Cohen was reimbursed through a retainer agreement in order to stop “false and extortionist accusations.”

In internal notes obtained by the committee, one ethics official described the changing explanations from Trump’s legal team as “evolving stories,” the chairman said.

At first, Dillon told the ethics officials that Trump didn’t owe Cohen any money and said that she confirmed with Trump that Cohen wasn’t owed any money in 2016 or 2017. The letter says that in one of the notes, the officials summarized the position of Trump’s lawyers: “Michael Cohen did not loan Pres Trump $.”

After Trump tweeted in May 2018 that the hush-money agreement was paid using a monthly retainer agreement, the ethics officials went back to Dillon and were told that all the payments were “in connection with legal services,” and compared them to “routine vendor payments,” according to the letter.