Michael Cohen pleads guilty

The following article was posted on the Axios.com website August 21, 2018:

Credit: Timothy A. Clar, AFP via Getty Images

President Trump’s former longtime attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight counts related to tax fraud, making false statements to a financial institution, excessive campaign contributions, and unlawful corporate contributions in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

During his guilty plea, Cohen said he was directed to violate campaign law at the direction of an unnamed candidate. He added that the same candidate directed him to pay $130,000 in hush money, which the candidate later reimbursed. Cohen told the court that he knew what he was doing was illegal.

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Omarosa Manigault Newman releases secret recording of $15,000-a-month job offer from Lara Trump

The following article by John Wagner was posted on the Washington Post website August 16, 2018:

President Trump’s relationship with Omarosa Manigault Newman goes back to “The Apprentice,” but has turned sour with her tell-all book and White House tapes. (Jenny Starrs /The Washington Post)

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman released a secret recording Thursday in a bid to bolster her contention that she was offered a $15,000-a-month contract from President Trump’s campaign to stay silent after being fired from her job.

On the recording, campaign aide Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, can be heard discussing salary considerations and other aspects of a campaign job with Manigault Newman and makes clear that she expects her to be positive about the president.

The release of the recording, during an interview with MSNBC, was the latest escalation of Manigault Newman’s feud with President Trump in the wake of the release of her tell-all book, “Unhinged,” which depicts him as racist and in mental decline.

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Omarosa, and Trump White House’s new hush-money problem

The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website August 11 2018:

Former reality star turned White House aide turned reality star Omarosa Manigault is spilling the tea on her days at the White House. Credit: Taylor Turner/The Washington Post

Skepticism abounds, for good reason, about Omarosa Manigault Newman’s White House tell-all. Like Michael Wolff, Manigault Newman has a long, demonstrated history of suspicious claims, and just because the things she writes confirm what lots of people on the left badly want to believe doesn’t mean they should be swallowed whole. Some of what she’s written has already been directly disputed, including by Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, who has been quite critical of the White House. We should all be very, very careful.

All of that said, this new revelation looks bad, in large part because it is substantiated — and because it has to do, yet again, with hush money.

The Post’s Josh Dawsey has a document verifying  Manigault Newman’s claim that she was offered what amounted to $15,000 per month in hush money to keep quiet about the White House. It was technically for a job with the Trump campaign, but it was premised on her signing a nondisclosure agreement that dealt with her time in the West Wing. That, notably, isn’t generally how NDAs work; they usually involve the job you are getting, not the one you previously had.

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Trump repaying the Stormy Daniels money doesn’t mean there were no campaign finance violations

The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website May 3, 2018:

Rudolph W. Giuliani said President Trump personally repaid his lawyer the $130,000 that was used to buy Stormy Daniels’s silence about an alleged affair. (Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)

This article has been updated.

It didn’t take former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani long to make his mark after joining President Trump’s legal team. Unfortunately, the mark Giuliani left was on his client.

During an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Giuliani volunteered a startling bit of information. The $130,000 that Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen admitted paying to porn star Stormy Daniels? Trump had repaid it. Continue reading “Trump repaying the Stormy Daniels money doesn’t mean there were no campaign finance violations”