Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen has handed his cell phone to Manhattan prosecutors investigating the $130,000 hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels.
The fixer revealed his cooperation to CNN on Wednesday, as part of the probe into a bid to stop the porn star going public with her affair with the former president before the 2016 election.
Trump denied the relationship again this week and called Daniels ‘Horseface’ as a grand jury was convened to hear evidence.
‘Most recently, they asked for my cell phones because they want to be able to extract from it the voice recordings that I had had with Keith Davidson, former attorney to Stormy Daniels before Michael Avenatti, as well as a bunch of emails, text messages and so on,’ Cohen told Don Lemon after meeting with prosecutors earlier this month.
Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges and was given three years in prison in 2018 for facilitating the $130,000 payment to Daniels.
He spent most of his sentence in home confinement in his Manhattan apartment.
Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen has handed his cell phone to Manhattan prosecutors investigating alleged hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels
Trump denied the relationship again this week and called Daniels ‘Horseface’
Federal prosecutors said the Trump Organization paid Cohen $420,000 to cover his original payment and tax liabilities, and reward him with a bonus.
He also responded to the video of his old boss pleading the Fifth 400 times over four hours in a deposition with New York’s Attorney General Letitia James.
‘Donald cannot keep track of the lies that he tells, and so, what better way to stop a fool from being deposed and hurting himself further than to tell him to plead the Fifth at least 400 times,’ he added.
On Tuesday night, Daniels hit back at Trump after he went on a tirade on Truth Social over the alleged payments.
Daniels claims to have slept with Trump in 2006, but the ex-president denied the allegations on his Truth Social app on Monday.
A grand jury is set to hear testimony this week about the former president’s role in the payment made to keep Daniels quiet during his 2016 campaign, the New York Times reported.
The porn star responded to Trump’s tirade on Twitter, claiming: ‘He opens his mouth more than I do my legs.
‘Thanks for just admitting that I was telling the truth about EVERYTHING,’ Daniels wrote. Guess I’ll take my “horse face” back to bed now, Mr. former “president”.’
Daniels claims she slept with Trump while he was married to former First Lady Melania Trump, who had given birth to their son Barron less than six months before their brief fling.
She said the president paid her $130,000 to keep quiet.
Trump lambasted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as a ‘radical’ prosecutor.
He also accused Bragg of spending more time investigating him than going after crime in New York City, and claims the Democrat leaked the grand jury report to the press himself.
Trump denied the allegations on his Truth Social app on Monday and derided Daniels as ‘Horseface’. Meanwhile, Daniels responded to Trump on Twitter
Stormy Daniels hit back at Donald Trump over alleged hush money payments. She claimed the former president paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about an affair in 2006
‘With murders and violent crime surging like never before in New York City, the Radical Left Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, just leaked to the Fake News Media that they are still going after the Stormy ”Horseface” Daniels,’ Trump wrote on Monday afternoon.
‘Working closely with the Weaponized Justice Department, this is a continuation of the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time. They long ago missed the Statute of Limitations, & I recently won big money against “Stormy” in the 9th Circuit – NEVER HAD AN AFFAIR. This is old news!’
His ‘big money’ line is likely in reference to a judge recently ordering Daniels to pay nearly $300,000 in Trump’s legal feel after her lawsuit against him failed. She had sued him for defamation over his denials of their alleged fling.
Daniels added on Tuesday: ‘I like sex. He likes to lie. Seems like a perfect analogy to me.’
The case could lead to criminal charges.
Trump lambasted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as a ‘radical’ prosecutor. He continues to deny Daniels’ allegations
Trump lashed out following reports that a grand jury has started hearing from witnesses over alleged ‘hush money’ payments
Daniels further added that Trump ‘opens his mouth more than I do my legs’
Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen previously admitted to paying Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to keep her silent about the alleged affair.
Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison for arranging the payment and a non-disclosure agreement.
He told a judge at the time that they were made ‘in co-ordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office’.
Now, with Trump several years out of office and running another campaign, witnesses are set to begin speaking before the New York City grand jury as prosecutors make their case for why the former president should be charged.
On Monday, among the witnesses seen arriving at the Manhattan judicial proceedings was reportedly David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer.
He previously admitted to prosecutors that he worked ‘in concert’ with the Trump 2016 campaign to arrange hush money payments for Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
A statement from the Manhattan DA’s office at the time said he helped facilitate the payments so the women would ‘not publicize damaging allegations’ about Trump.
Other expected witnesses include former National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard and two Trump Organization employees, according to The Times.
It was revealed late last week that federal prosecutors had discussed charging Trump with campaign finance violations over the payments to Daniels and McDougal after he’d left office.
While Justice Department guidance cautioned against charging a sitting president, there were conversations on whether to use the evidence compiled from prosecuting Cohen in 2018 to go after Trump when his term was over, according to the book Untouchable by CNN analyst Elie Honig.
But that was apparently derailed by the chaos of that month, including the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Honig wrote that such national crises made alleged campaign financial fouls ‘seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison’.
