CNN: Trump's lawyer admits he paid a porn star. Legal questions remain.
Cohen said in a statement Tuesday evening that he facilitated a $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, in 2016. His statement followed a legal complaint from the campaign finance watchdog Common Cause, which called for investigations into whether the payment -- reportedly made to stop Clifford from speaking about an alleged affair with Trump in 2006 -- violated campaign finance law.
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Campaign Legal Center general counsel Larry Noble, a CNN contributor and former Federal Election Commission general counsel, said one of the top questions now is "Where did the money come from?" "It's not usual for an attorney representing someone to pay out of his own pocket," Noble said. Noble, along with Sunlight Foundation executive director John Wonderlich and University of California, Irvine, law professor Rick Hasen, noted in separate interviews that the statement was carefully worded and left open the possibility that Trump had personally reimbursed Cohen or the source of the funding was a third party.
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However, it is unclear what the FEC or Justice Department might do. The FEC commissioners must vote to open an investigation, and given the partisan breakdown of the committee and its recent voting pattern, Noble predicted last month that it would likely opt not to investigate. He said Wednesday that the statement from Cohen could give commissioners who were leaning against investigating "something to latch onto," but he warned it was not a sure thing they would not vote to investigate.
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Suffice it to say, Noble said, the Justice Department has not had "great luck" recently in this area.