Huffman Wants Investigation Into Trump Lawyer’s Payment to Porn Star
California Democrat wants to know if Trump campaign tried to ‘evade the fundamental disclosure requirements’
California Rep. Jared Huffman wants the Justice Department to investigate a payment made to an adult film actress to keep silent about her alleged affair with President Donald Trump.
In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Democratic lawmaker pointed to a New York Times report that Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen admitted he paid Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, $130,000 out of his own pocket.
“As Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions has recused himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign, it falls to you to immediately and fully investigate this contribution and expenditure, as well as whether this payment was part of a pattern of deliberate attempts by the Trump campaign to evade the fundamental disclosure requirements of federal campaign law,” Huffman wrote, according to The (San Jose) Mercury News.
Huffman said the case is not like other cases.
“Outside of the John Edwards case, I can’t think of any parallel,” he told the newspaper. The former North Carolina senator and two-time Democratic presidential candidate faced criminal charges after it was revealed friends spent $1 million to support his mistress Rielle Hunter.
Huffman said he wants to know if the payments were a violation of campaign finance law.
“At a minimum, we need to ask some hard questions about whether this truly came out of Trump’s lawyer’s personal funds, what if anything Trump knew about it, and why there wasn’t any attempt to comply with campaign finance laws,” he said.
The payment was first revealed by The Wall Street Journal last month. Clifford told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Cohen’s revelation freed her from a nondisclosure agreement.
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