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Stormy Daniels sues Trump, says ‘hush agreement’ invalid because he never signed

Adult film star Stormy Daniels sued Donald Trump Tuesday, alleging that he never signed the nondisclosure agreement that his lawyer had arranged with her.

The civil suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and obtained by NBC News, alleges that her agreement not to disclose her "intimate" relationship with Trump is not valid because while both Daniels and Trump's attorney Michael Cohen signed it, Trump never did.

Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, signed both the agreement and a side letter agreement using her professional name on October 28, 2016, just days before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen signed the document the same day. Both agreements are appended to the lawsuit as Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2.

The "hush agreement," as it's called in the suit, refers to Trump throughout as David Dennison, and Clifford as Peggy Peterson. In the side letter agreement, the true identity of DD is blacked out, but Clifford's attorney, Michael Avenatti, says the individual is Trump.

Each document includes a blank where "DD" is supposed to sign, but neither blank is signed.

According to the lawsuit, which Avenatti announced in a tweet, Clifford and Trump had an intimate relationship that lasted from summer 2006 "well into the year 2007." The relationship allegedly included meetings in Lake Tahoe and at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The 2016 hush agreement directed that $130,000 be paid into the trust account of Clifford's then-attorney. In return, Clifford was not to disclose any confidential information about Trump or his sexual partners to anyone beyond a short list of individuals she'd already told about the relationship, or share any texts or photos from Trump.

The suit alleges that Cohen has tried to keep Clifford from talking about the relationship as recently as Feb. 27, 2018.

"To be clear, the attempts to intimidate Ms. Clifford into silence and 'shut her up' in order to 'protect Mr. Trump' continue unabated," says the suit. "On or about February 27, 2018, Mr. Trump's attorney Mr. Cohen surreptitiously initiated a bogus arbitration proceeding against Ms. Clifford in Los Angeles." Binding arbitration is specified as a means of dispute resolution.

Clifford and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, are asking the Los Angeles County Superior Court to declare that both the hush agreement and the side agreement "were never formed, and therefore do not exist, because, among other things, Mr. Trump never signed the agreements."

"In the alternative, Plaintiff seeks an order of this Court declaring that the agreements in the forms set out in Exhibits 1 and 2 are invalid, unenforceable, and/or void under the doctrine of unconscionability."



The suit also says that Trump must know that Cohen is trying to silence Clifford, since rules for the New York bar, of which Cohen is a member, require him to keep his client informed at all times. "t strains credulity to conclude that Mr. Cohen is acting on his own accord and without the express approval and knowledge of his client Mr. Trump."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. President Trump's outside attorney, John Dowd, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Lord Jim wrote:I'd be interested in the opinion of our lawyer types here re the legal merits of the argument her attorney is making...

(2) the contract is unconscionable; and/or

(3) the contract is "illegal" and/or "violates public policy,"

• The agreement says that if Clifford violates the agreement, she must pay Trump $1 million for each breach.

Scooter wrote:The fact that penalties far exceed the value of the contract does not in itself make it unconscionable, since the damages that could emanate from a breach would also far exceed that value.

I think the "violates public policy" angle would be more tenable, since it would be grossly against the public interest to keep hidden the fact that a presidential candidate made a payoff to keep some aspect of his conduct hidden during an election campaign.

BUSTED: Stormy Daniels’ attorney releases new email where Michael Cohen admits he’s speaking for Donald Trump

In a Friday evening interview with Anderson Cooper, Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti revealed a new chain of emails that create a paper-trail of the transfer for the $130,000 payoff. The email also has Cohen admitting that he was speaking on behalf of Trump.

Avenatti also noted that there was language in their exchange of emails that seems to refute the claim that Cohen was acting of his own accord and not on behalf of the Trump Organization or Trump himself.

He also refuted the idea that the arbitration was a valid legal standing to move forward. He explained the case was brought by an LLC and not by Trump. Avenatti also questioned whether Cohen is licensed to practice law in California, where the case moved forward. If Cohen is not barred in California, it is illegal to act as an attorney in the state.

“This is yet another e-mail that shows that throughout this negotiation period, this period during which his attorney, Cohn, was negotiating on the president’s behalf,” he explained. “He was routinely using his e-mail address at the Trump Organization and his e-mail signature block to identify that he was doing this on behalf of the Trump Organization.

And if you look at the e-mail, the last e-mail in the string, it talks about how the office is closed for Yom Kippur. And, if I can set the stage, mid-October was around the time period that the payment was to be made. It ultimately was not made and the deal fell apart for a while.”

He explained that that nugget of information is important because if Cohen was acting of his own accord and not on behalf of Trump, it wouldn’t have mattered whether the Trump Organization office was open or not.

Another email exchange walks through the fact that the payment had been deposited into Daniels’ account.

“We believe this is pivotal for the following reason: the initial e-mail in the string, which is at the bottom of the page is an e-mail from a representative of the alerting him that they have effectively laid out his wishes,” Avenatti said about the payment to Daniels. “He turns around then and forwards that e-mail to himself. He then turns around and forwards that to his personal e-mail account which is the next e-mail in the string above that.”

“Why would Michael Cohn then feel the need to forward that e-mail to himself to his private e-mail address to then communicate with Stormy Daniels’ attorney?” Cooper wondered.

Avenatti said he didn’t have an answer.

In the second half of the interview, Avenatti explained that the payment to Daniels was done via wire transfer. Banks are required to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) for transfers over $9,000, and that can be tracked because the Internal Revenue Service requires specific details be filed for large transfers.

The federal government would have that information and Avenatti explained that Trump and the IRS could release the information on where the wire transfers all came from. If they wanted.

The key legal question is whether the $130,000 was intended to advance Trump’s chances in the election. If it was, it should not have been routed through a corporation and might amount to an illegally large campaign contribution. If Trump paid the money in connection with his campaign, it should have been reported on his campaign finance reports.

“I do think this is moving closer and closer to the territory where Edwards was subject to criminal prosecution,” said Hampton Dellinger, a former North Carolina deputy attorney general who closely followed the case against the former Democratic presidential hopeful.

Michael Avenatti
‏ @MichaelAvenatti
10h10 hours ago

Michael Avenatti Retweeted Tom Llamas

So let me get this straight - Cohen now claims he borrowed $130k on his house and pays interest on it in order to give that same $130k (on behalf of a Billionaire) to a woman who according to him was lying.
https://youtu.be/AR6eXWNJzoY via @YouTube

Michael Avenatti
‏ @MichaelAvenatti
8h8 hours ago

Michael Avenatti Retweeted Preet Bharara

It doesn't get any better than this.

Michael Avenatti added,

Preet Bharara
Verified account @PreetBharara
Sometimes my personal lawyer will just pay my mortgage off. Without asking. Such a good guy. I'm lucky.

The Stormy Daniels Scandal Gets Serious

Michelle Goldberg MARCH 9, 2018

In January we learned, thanks to The Wall Street Journal, that Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Donald Trump, arranged a $130,000 hush money payment to the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The payment was to stop Daniels from speaking out about an alleged affair she’d had with Trump shortly after Melania Trump, his third wife, gave birth to their son, Barron.

With any previous president the story would have been explosive, but with this one, it felt relatively minor. The real scandal, it seemed, was that there was no scandal, because no one expects any better of Trump. The religious right was willing to give him a “mulligan,” in the words of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. Liberals rolled their eyes at right-wing hypocrisy, but ranked the affair fairly low on the list of Trump outrages.

But Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — is a clever capitalist who’s been determined to force the story of her relationship with Trump into the public eye. She has parlayed her new notoriety into a series of strip-club appearances, including two in South Florida on Friday and Saturday. More significantly, her lawyer has filed a lawsuit arguing that the nondisclosure agreement she signed is null and void because Trump himself never signed it. The suit, ingeniously, has given Daniels’s lawyer a pretext to make that agreement public.

As this drama unfolds, it’s becoming clear that, for all its sordid details, it isn’t really a sex scandal. It’s a campaign finance scandal, a transparency scandal and potentially part of an ongoing national security scandal. It’s salacious and absurd, but we should take it seriously. Trump’s team certainly seems to; Cohen recently obtained a temporary restraining order to silence Daniels.

Let’s start with the campaign finance piece. On Jan. 22, the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice claiming that the $130,000 payment to Daniels constituted an in-kind contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign, in violation of federal campaign law.

In response, Cohen claimed that the payment was a private transaction that he was able to “facilitate” with his own personal funds. (It was made through a limited liability company Cohen created called Essential Consultants.) “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said in a statement to The Times.

Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, told me that even if Cohen didn’t tell Trump what he did, Trump was still responsible, since “the actions of agents are attributable to their principals.” But the release of the NDA makes clear that Trump himself was a party to the agreement.

If Trump authorized the $130,000 payment, it’s harder to explain away his campaign’s failure to disclose it, as required by law. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all but confirmed Trump’s involvement on Wednesday, when she said that a recent arbitration proceeding — the one that resulted in the temporary restraining order — was “won in the president’s favor.”

Norman Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Barack Obama’s former ethics czar, points out another potential violation on Trump’s part. He calls it the “Al Capone problem.” The Daniels NDA refers repeatedly to “property” that she agreed to turn over to Trump, including video images, still images, emails and text messages. Eisen argues that Trump was required to report ownership of this property, as well as any obligations he might have had to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000, in his federal financial disclosure forms.

“The asset here is this incredibly valuable agreement with Stormy,” Eisen told me. “Imagine what she could get if she has texts or images. Imagine the millions she could command! So there’s this incredibly valuable agreement, and the L.L.C., Essential Consultants, which Trump now appears to be a beneficiary of. That’s an asset.” But it’s an asset Trump didn’t reveal.

Finally, the Daniels story is germane to the overriding scandal of the Trump administration, the one involving Trump’s relationship with Russia. Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled an infamous dossier of opposition research on Trump, wrote that Russia could blackmail Trump with evidence of his “sexual perversion.” Nothing we know of Daniels confirms the dossier’s outré claims about what such perversion entailed. The NDA does, however, show that Trump was susceptible to blackmail.

Indeed, Daniels isn’t the only woman who was allegedly paid off after an encounter with Trump. The former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claims she had an affair with Trump, was paid $150,000 by a media company closely aligned with the president, which quashed her story. Steve Bannon told “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff that another Trump lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, “took care” of “a hundred women” during the campaign.

“It all kind of fits together in a way,” Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said of the Daniels scandal and the Russia one. “It’s really blackmail over sex.”

Ultimately, the details of Trump’s relationship with Daniels will likely come out. David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told me he was surprised by how legally strong Daniels’s lawsuit seems, due to the way the original NDA was written. “Any halfway competent lawyer could have drafted the contract so that he didn’t need to sign it,” Super said of Cohen and Trump. “But they didn’t do it that way.”

Should Daniels prevail in court, we might learn interesting information about the president. Among other things, the NDA forbids her from discussing Trump’s “alleged children” or “paternity information.” But the scandal will lie less in the details of Trump’s degeneracy than in the steps he and his lawyers took to cover it up. “This is early days yet in the unfolding of this scandal,” said Eisen. Like Trump himself, it’s preposterous, but it’s not going away.

• How did we get here?
  The key to understanding this mess is realizing that no one thought Trump was going to win. Trump was supposed to go back to his old life, only with a brand that was significantly more valuable. Daniels took the relatively low payoff of $130,000, because come December her story about sex with a horndog businessman was going to be worthless. And Cohen figured he’d get paid back the $130,000 after the election, when no one would bother looking at the obvious campaign finance violation.
  
  But then the old fool actually did it! He won the election! And things got weird.
  
  Who knew what, when, and why it matters.
  For the past two weeks, Michael Cohen has been trying to limit the damage here by swearing up and down that he paid Daniels off all on his own. Clearly someone exceeded the $2,700 campaign finance limit — you don’t have to give directly to the campaign, actions that benefit the candidate count — and Cohen wants to take all the blame on himself. Because if anyone from the Trump family or business participated in the payoff, they are also guilty of violating campaign finance laws. If the Trump campaign routed $130,000 of donor money through the Trump organization to pay Daniels, they face potential prosecution for money laundering on top of the campaign finance issues.
  
  So Cohen is falling on this grenade and claiming that the campaign finance violation is his alone. Forget about him postponing the payoff twice because he couldn’t get the go-ahead from Trump. Forget about him complaining that he didn’t get reimbursed fast enough. That’s Michael Cohen’s story, and he’s sticking to it!
  
  What’s Stormy Daniels’ play here?
  Well, Stormy woke up on November 9, 2016 to the realization that she’d been grossly underpaid. You don’t have to like her to appreciate that she had every motivation to go over that NDA with a fine-tooth comb looking for holes. If Cohen wanted to buy her silence, he should have drafted a better document! And he should have said, “NO COMMENT,” over and over until reporters stopped asking him about it. Instead, he told ten different lies about Daniels, violating the non-disclosure part of the non-disclosure agreement. And he forced her to put out a statement denying the affair, violating legal ethics. Now’s the time in every Michael Cohen piece when we slag him for going to Cooley Law School.
  
  As for Daniels, well she wants to get paid! Once she gets the court to declare the NDA unenforceable, her career will get a huge boost and she’ll be able to sell her story for a gazillion Ameros. Add a zero to every dollar figure if you can label it, “The Story The White House Didn’t Want You To See!”
  
  But Daniels also wants to make them pay. Donald Trump sent his lackey out to threaten her behind closed doors and slag her in the media. Because if you have a problem, Michael Cohen can make it worse! If there was an amicable settlement to be had, it probably went out the window when he called her a liar. Daniels’s lawsuit makes explicit reference to all the ways Cohen violated legal ethics rules in the State of New York. If he wants to insist that he did this whole deal on his own, then she’ll point out the law requires lawyers to keep their clients informed and not to use personal money to fund a case. He wanted a dirty fight, so she she gave it to him.
  
  But first Daniels needs to get out of the NDA so she can tell her story and sell the dick pics or whatever she’s got. She’s betting that Trump would rather take the hit from the bad publicity than get embroiled in another campaign finance investigation if he contests the lawsuit.
  
  Which leaves Trump with two options. He can sue her and demand she keep quiet, acknowledging his role in both the affair and the campaign finance violation. Or he can just let her tell her story and hope to weather the … storm. These are not good options.
  
  But we’re sure the Dealmaker in Chief will work it all out. Right after he builds that wall and talks North Korea out of its nukes. YOU BET.

Now’s the time in every Michael Cohen piece when we slag him for going to Cooley Law School.

According to Cooley's ABA required disclosures, only 27.4% of graduates from the class of 2015 obtained full-time, long term, bar passage required employment 9 months after graduation.[6] 23.8% of graduates were unemployed 9 months after graduation.[7] Only 51.86% of graduates managed to pass a state bar exam in 2015, a requirement to practice law.[8] In 2017, the school was one of ten American law schools found to be out of compliance with the American Bar Association's requirement that schools only admit students who appear capable of earning a J.D. degree and passing the bar examination.[9] The school was recently ranked the worst law school in the country by Above the Law.[10]