Here is what the press is getting wrong about Michael Cohen's statement
By Jennifer Rubin February 14 at 11:30 AM
The New York Times reports that President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen says he paid “out of his own pocket” hush money to Stormy Daniels. That would be preposterous, since no one thinks Cohen would have in essence made a gift to Trump in the form of settling a claim. (If so, was the federal gift tax paid? Did Trump account for this as imputed income?) But wait. Cohen did not say the words “out of pocket” Link to tweet
" target="_blank">in his statement. He claimed no such thing, and it makes a difference.
As Orin Kerr points out, Cohen says he used his own funds “to facilitate” the payment and denies either the campaign or the Trump Organization reimbursed him. He says neither the campaign nor the Trump Organization was party to the agreement. He does NOT say he made the payment out of his own volition, nor does he say Trump personally didn’t foot the bill and sign the agreement. In fact, it is impossible to contemplate a binding deal for Daniels’s silence without Trump being a party. Now, from Cohen’s statement, it is not altogether clear that money from Cohen went to Daniels. Kerr observes:
To “facilitate,” the dictionary tells us, means to assist with or to make something easier. Given that, I would think that the most literal reading of Cohen’s statement is just that he used his own funds to arrange the payment. He’s not making any statement about whose $130,000 was paid. For example, if it took Cohen a few hundred dollars to set up an entity to pay Daniels, and to wire someone else’s $130,000 to her, then he would have been using his own personal funds to facilitate that payment. Sending on the money would be a transaction between two parties, Daniels and the entity Cohen set up, and there would have been no need to reimburse Cohen $130,000 because it wasn’t Cohen’s money that was sent.
There are other explanations as well. For example, perhaps Cohen did pay the monies from a pool of money Trump gave him to settle such matters. In that case, Cohen needs to explain whether other claims were settled in such fashion. Tax and legal ethics specialists will need to opine whether there is anything illegal about this, well, peculiar arrangement.
Also possible is that Cohen paid Daniels and then got reimbursed from Trump personally. If that’s the case, Cohen — don’t laugh — has an ethics problem. Link to tweet
" target="_blank">Renato Mariotti, a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Illinois and former prosecutor, notes that the American Bar Association’s “Rule of Professional Conduct 1.8(e) prohibits lawyers from ‘provid[ing] financial assistance to a client in connection with pending or contemplated litigation.’ If Michael Cohen paid this money to Stormy Daniels to settle her claims against Trump, he violated the rule.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2018/02/14/here-is-what-the-press-is-getting-wrong-about-michael-cohens-statement/?utm_term=.b124b5862348
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