THE lawyer for former U.S. President Donald Trump pledged Sunday to mount a vigorous defense against allegations that he paid $130,000 in hush money to a porn star to boost his election chances in 2016 to keep her from talking about her claim that she had a one-night tryst with Trump a decade before.
Defense lawyer Joe Tacopina told CNN’s “State of the Union” show that the payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels was a “personal expenditure, not a campaign expenditure.” Trump has long denied the porn star’s allegation they had an affair but acknowledged the payment to her just ahead of his defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Tacopina assailed New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg for getting a grand jury last Thursday to charge Trump in connection with the payment, saying that had Trump “not been running for president [in 2024], he would not have been indicted.”
“We will loudly and proudly say not guilty” when the former president is arraigned in the case in New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday, Tacopina said.
But the defense lawyer said he would not immediately ask that the case be dismissed. “No, that would be showmanship,” he said.Tacopina, however, contended that “no law fits” the basic allegations in the case, and that the federal government decided to not bring charges against Trump, although Bragg, a state prosecutor, proceeded.
“A state prosecutor has somehow tried to make this a felony,” Tacopina said.
The defense lawyer criticized the state’s key witness in the case, Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time personal attorney and political fixer. Tacopina called Cohen, who made the payment to the porn actress and then was reimbursed by Trump, “a pathological, convicted liar who is continually unable to tell the same story twice.”
Cohen was convicted of several offenses in connection with the payment to Daniels and served more than a year in prison.
Lanny Davis, Cohen’s lawyer, also spoke with CNN on Sunday.
Davis said Cohen, while pleading guilty in the case, “lied for Donald Trump for 10 years,” and has now provided prosecutors a vast set of documents showing how the payment to the porn actress played out with the consent of Trump and subsequent reimbursement of Cohen.
The payments to Cohen were listed on Trump company records as payment to Cohen for legal fees. But U.S. news accounts of the investigation say the payments were to keep Daniels’ allegations of the affair out of the news in the weeks before the 2016 election. The Wall Street Journal first broke news of the hush money payment in early 2018.
In the charging allegations against Cohen, the government stated that the payment to Daniels was at the direction of “Individual 1,” which the government acknowledged was Trump.