Trump campaign pays lawyer who's trying to make Stormy Daniels shut up
HuffPost US
S.V. DATE
Apr 16th 2018 4:23PM
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign this year has been paying the Beverly Hills lawyer handling his lawsuit against an adult film actress – complicating his supporters’ claims that the original $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels had nothing do with the 2016 election.
The campaign paid Charles Harder’s firm $25,000 on Jan. 4, and then $68,181.25 on Feb. 22, according to the campaign’s quarterly filing Sunday with the Federal Election Commission.
It is unclear how much of that, if any, is related to Trump’s continued efforts to keep Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, from discussing the affair she said they had in 2006. Neither Harder nor the Trump campaign responded to several requests for comment.
One Republican close to Trump said he can understand the logic of treating the original nondisclosure agreement Clifford signed one way and the efforts to enforce it the opposite way.
“I can see as how they could construe it as a re-election issue. And I can see how they would construe the NDA as not an election issue,” he said on the condition of anonymity. “But I’m not so sanguine about the believability of that.”
Paul Ryan, a lawyer for the group Common Cause, which has filed complaints against Trump and his campaign with the FEC and the Department of Justice, said the payments could have been for other work Harder has done for Trump, including an attempt to stop the publication of the book “Fire and Fury,” an unflattering portrait of the first year of Trump’s presidency.
Harder also represented Trump’s wife, Melania, in defamation lawsuits against a British tabloid and a Maryland blogger who published stories alleging that she had once been an escort. Those cases, though, were settled in Melania Trump’s favor in early 2017 – meaning it’s unlikely that Harder was still collecting bills for them a year later, Ryan said.
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