Chris Cuomo Punked: Broke Big Trump Tape Scoop, But Michael Cohen Secretly Taped Cuomo Too
He told Cuomo that he handled the payment to Stormy Daniels alone.
The Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen recorded a two-hour conversation with CNN’s Chris Cuomo about the alleged payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Cohen told Cuomo that he, not Trump, handled the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels.
From The Wall Street Journal:
In the nearly two-hour conversation with CNN reporter Chris Cuomo, which the people said appears to have been surreptitiously recorded by Mr. Cohen, the former Trump lawyer discussed at length the payment he arranged in October 2016, a month before the presidential election, to Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels.
“I did it on my own,” Mr. Cohen said of the payment, according to the people familiar with the matter. The conversation took place after The Wall Street Journal in January revealed that Mr. Cohen had arranged the payment to Ms. Clifford.
The sources told WSJ that Cohen reassured Cuomo a few times during the phone conversation that he was not recording the interview:
During the conversation with Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Cohen assured the reporter that he wasn’t running a tape, according to the people familiar with the matter. He told Mr. Cuomo he was placing the phone in his desk drawer and that the conversation was off the record. The phone appeared to record the entire conversation, the people said.
It isn’t clear whether Mr. Cohen makes any indication on the tape that he arranged the payment to Ms. Clifford in order to bolster Mr. Trump’s campaign. If Mr. Cohen did pay Ms. Clifford to help the candidate’s chances of being elected, he and the campaign may have violated campaign-finance law by making an in-kind contribution exceeding the legal limit and by not disclosing the contribution.
At one point, asked if the payment could be construed as an in-kind contribution, Mr. Cohen responds: “It wasn’t for the campaign. It was for him,” referring to Mr. Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This report comes less than 24 hours after Cuomo reported on a taped conversation between Trump and Cohen.
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Comments
Snakes are bipartisan.
Am I the only one who doesn’t care about this story? The politician morality ship sailed in 1992. The (D) party and media defended a serial philanderer and accused rapist for eight straight years, plus all the years they let him get away with it while governor. Sorry, you newly-minted Puritans. Go to hell.
The “Law on Unintended Consequences” had the “Access Hollywood” tape inoculate Trump to these sorts of nonsense.
In 1992? That ship sailed much earlier. That charming prince JFK pimped out his teenage interns in the White House swimming pool, letting his large campaign donors cop a BJ while JFK watched.
#metoo JFK was a child sex trafficker
True but the difference between then and now is that Kennedy behavior wasn’t given a pass in public by the entire media. It was simply swept under the rug because if it became well-known it would ruin the family. Gary Hart’s presidential run was destroyed by infidelity. Four years later, the same people said it didn’t matter.
Nobody outside DC knew about JFK. Nobody at all outside those directly involved knew about Harding. Even with Clinton, he denied it and many people believed him. Trump is the first person elected president despite being publicly known as an adulterer.
But we knew about Trump decades ago. He publicly bragged about his multiple encounters with married women, and appallingly compared this to service in Vietnam. And he made no secret whatsoever of his infidelities to his first two wives. For better or worse he was elected anyway. The idea that it would have harmed him for the Stormy Daniels story to come out is ridiculous. Why would anyone who was not bothered by all the rest suddenly be bothered by this?
Looks like you’re in doubt.
It was for better.
Adultery is a much different thing than sexual abuse and rape. You missed a major distinction again. Clinton was widely known as an adulterer before becoming president. He was cheating on Hillary from the day they moved in together. That some people believed he was OK proves nothing. JFK was involved with a Nazi spy. You cite a reference to Harding from one of your history books, as if it someone proves you argument is correct that Trump is the shameful first known adulterer.
No, he wasn’t. He was accused of it, but he denied it and most people believed him. The truth didn’t come out until after his reelection.
Not some people, most people, certainly most people who voted for him.
There’s no evidence for this. But even if it’s true, the public didn’t know about it. The public had no idea what he was up to.
It does. We now know that Harding had at least two mistresses, but during his life it was a deep secret; had it been publicly known it would have sunk his career. 2016 was the first time the US public knowingly elected an adulterer president. It won’t be the last time. But Stormy Daniels is completely irrelevant; her story coming out before the election would not have changed even one vote.
From what I understand, absolutely NO ONE from Arkansas believed his denials, for they had first or second hand knowledge. And news reporters followed the paraphrased dictum: A reporters job is to smother the news with a pillow, until it stops moving, if it reflects badly on Democrats.
Reporters covered any accusations against Bill Clinton with Nelson’s blind eye. The reporters at least were were faithful to her, they repeated that performance with his wife. To this day I know liberals who don’t believe she violated any laws with her private server. Needless to say, none of them has ever held a security clearance. Everyone I know who has one above the NOFORN level knows she belongs in jail.
Add to that the (in)famous Teddy Kennedy and the La Brasserie affairs – once sexually assaulting a waitress with Senator Dodd, and once found on the floor with a blonde lobbyist. These happened in the 80’s. The incidents were well-known enough that it was mentioned in the press in 1990. I heard about them around that time from a friend who worked in the Senate.
And Kennedy was never elected president (though that was more for his manslaughter than for his adultery).
NY, NJ and DC are one-party consent for phone call recording.
States like Pennsylvania, ban any and all means that could possibly get a politician in trouble.
I thought that conversations between an attorney and client were protected from disclosure? Where did this tape come from? Was it the Mueller investigation or Cohen?
“Where did this tape come from?”
It is unknown at the moment.
A liberal troll on a different website reminded me that Lanny Davis is acting as Cohen’s lawyer. (I forgot because it blows my mind to think about it.) Lanny Davis provided the tapes to CNN. In effect, this means Cohen provided the tapes to CNN.
I have no idea, none, why the federal prosecutors made no move to keep what I presumed was federal evidence, but this is Trump’s former attorney providing (you cannot call this leaking) taped conversations with his former client directly to a major media organization.
One thing this guarantees is that Cohen’s career as a practicing attorney is over – can you imagine anyone hiring him, knowing that he’s likely to make secret tape recordings of his conversations, and release them whenever he thinks it’s convenient for him?
I don’t blame him if he honestly decided that his career as a lawyer is over anyway, and the best thing to do with Trump’s waiving of privilege is to have Lanny Davis, as his personal attorney, wage a public crusade against Trump using Cohen’s recordings as the most sound strategy to keep Cohen out of jail – perhaps by rising in the esteem of Trump’s enemies. That’s Cohen’s business. I think it makes him a bad lawyer, but he was already a shady and questionable lawyer.
However, other lawyers letting this pass and not shouting at the top of their lungs that this is not okay for a lawyer to do… that’s their business…
I do not have an attorney and only had one during my divorce, but if i ever hire another i will require that he signs a contract to never record our conversations before anything is discussed. Cohen has been threatened with disbarment but is unlikely to ever find another client in any case. Pun intended.
Trump, through Guilliani, waived privilege for the recordings.
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/07/23/trump-waive-attorney-client-privilege-recordings-michael-cohen/
Yes it’s Allahpundit and CNN, but read it anyway.
So funny, CNN plays a nothing burger tape between a lawyer and client discussing legitimate business. Then they will be forced to play Cohens confession that he alone payed Stormy. Clearing Trump!
CNN/tax returns redux.
I can’t imagine how Trump didn’t have a finger in this. Seeing how he loves trolling the cuckoo left.
You just know all the press want to complain about Cohen surreptitiously recording Cuomo, but even they know how bad that would look. Maybe Ocasio-Cortez will pick it up.
PS: I just heard Joe Lieberman calling for Dems to vote against her.
It appears that one person’s “hush money” may be what another might refer to as an “out-of-court settlement, the details of which were not revealed”. There must be a line of some sort between the two, musn’t there?
Col T: You have more company in the “Who cares?” department that you might imagine….
Can we borrow one of Maxine Waters’ feces-throwing jail birds and aim him at Cuomo?
Ummmm, so?
Wait, this means that a 60-year-old Trump can keep up with models and porn stars? Yeah, that’s just terrible.
LOL, I love it. Slimey Cuomo got punked by a slimey lawyer.
“…Trump is the first person elected president despite being publicly known as an adulterer….”
Wrong. Clinton gets that award.
No, he does not. He was not publicly known as an adulterer until after his reelection.
Only true for people who relied on the MSM for news.
You obviously never read papers from Arkansas.
“You’d better put some ice on that”
Re, The tape regarding Trump paying cash for the rights to the article about the stripper – linked from the Powerpoint article:
“Posted on July 24, 2018 by sundance
This is funny…. this is actually very funny to anyone who knows Trump lingo.
Lanny is hung up on the wording “cash” from POTUS Trump and tries to spin it a particular way. Despite what some may say, there is a possibility Lanny is not being intentionally malicious. What Lanny is missing is the context of “cash” in relation to the question Donald Trump asks moments prior about “financing”.
Trump asks the question about “financing” from his business dealing position where “financing” equals “loans”; and he responds to Michael Cohen from the same perspective where “cash” equals “money-on-hand”, ie. not a loan. [‘what financing? we have cash’]
Listen:
Here’s where Lanny might be intentionally malicious. Notice how the recording is abruptly edited to cut off right when Trump starts the sentence with the word “check”. If the entire recording were to be released it would be a conversation like: “what financing? we have cash, use cash, just write a check”… An ordinary transactional nothingburger. This is silly. Go listen again.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/07/24/cnn-obtains-trump-cohen-recording-from-lanny-davis/
If that is the case, then when the truth gets out, and it will, what little credibility Davis or the tape has will be shot.
LOL at Chris Cuomo. He’s such a gullible derp.
The media lost its credibility on sexual misconduct matters decades ago, when it ignored stories about JFK and RFK, and later went all-in defending EMK after his drunken murder of Mary Jo Kopechne, and all of his frolics in DC for years after that.
Then the media just couldn’t find it in their playbook to do anything other than shield and defend the Unabanger during his eight years in the White House.
As a practical matter, if lawyers are going to record conversations with clients, just how difficult would it be to automatically save these in encrypted files?
Our political system is deeply corrupt. Our “parties” are simply an on-going negotiation on how quickly we move to the left, and how blatantly they transfer wealth from the people to the government. Trump does not see the world through a Dem/Republican lens though. He is not a politician. He is a corrective agent that God injected into the stew to be a scourge on both their houses. He is crude and impolite and unrepentant, but also necessary. He is the bitter pill that America needs to swallow.