Stormy Daniels Payoff Unlikely to Cause Legal Issues for Trump

CYBERSPACE—A leading citizen’s watchdog group says that an alleged $130,000 hush money payout to AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels from Donald Trump’s personal lawyer may have violated campaign finance laws, while a separate group speculated on Tuesday that it had found the smoking gun possibly proving that the payoff actually came from the Trump campaign. But according to some experts, none of the accusations against Trump in the Daniels affair are likely to lead to prosecutions or other legal actions—though similar allegations have led to at least one prosecution of a presidential candidate in the recent past. In 2011, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, a Democrat, was prosecuted over charges that he broke campaign finance laws by paying about $1 million in hush money to his mistress, Rielle Hunter. Edwards had an ongoing extramarital affair with Hunter during his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Hunter bore Edwards’ child—all during a time when Edwards’ wife Elizabeth was suffering from cancer, which later killed her. Following a January 12 Wall Street Journal report that Trump, or at least his lawyer Michael Cohen, paid the six-figure sum to Daniels in exchange for her silence over an extramarital relationship with Trump about a decade ago, the watchdog group Common Cause filed a complaint with the United States Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. Common Cause says that the payment to Daniels should count as a campaign contribution “because the funds were paid for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential general election,” according to Common Cause campaign finance expert Paul S. Ryan. If so, the contribution would be illegal both because the sum exceeded legal limits, and was not disclosed on the campaign’s official finance reports.  Cohen dismissed the Common Cause complaint as “baseless.” According to a report in the USA Today newspaper, legal experts believe that the accusations against Trump over the payment to Daniels will not lead to prosecutions, even though similar charges against Edwards did result in indictments and a trial. “I have real doubts that the Department of Justice has the independence and the fortitude to go after this,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former prosecutor in public integrity cases under the George W. Bush administration. The head of the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is too consumed with trying to curry favor with (Trump) at every turn,” Zeidenberg said, adding that pursuing a case over the Stormy Daniels payment would be a “a bridge too far” for Sessions. Another citizen watchdog group, Citizens for Ethics, identified a payment from the Trump campaign to the Trump Tower account of $130,888 on December 21. Though the group noted that the payment could be “a coincidence” the similarity to the $130,000 payment alleged to be made by Cohen to Daniels is “worth asking about.” An investigation by the Washington Post, however, said that the possibility that the “rent” payment was in fact a reimbursement for the hush money to Daniels “doesn’t  pass the smell test.” Above, Stormy Daniels at the 2016 AVN Awards Show, where she won Best Drama for Wanted (Wicked/Adam & Eve); photo by Jeff Koga