Trump’s Hush Money Case With Porn Star Is Back to Haunt Him

One of former President Donald Trump’s most salacious scandals is rising up from the past to haunt him again. 

It’s the infamous hush-money case related to Trump’s alleged affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. And the probe appears to be getting serious: Manhattan’s District Attorney’s office has recently begun showing evidence to a grand jury, according to the New York Times, in a development that could set the stage for potential criminal charges within a matter of months. 

That means the long-dormant cash-for-silence scandal—in which Daniels was paid to keep quiet before the 2016 election—has suddenly become one more looming criminal threat hanging over the former president as he revs up for the 2024 campaign. Trump already faces multiple other serious investigations, including one led by a state prosecutor in Georgia into potential election meddling, and a federal special counsel probe into his handling of sensitive government documents and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol uprising. 

There are multiple signs that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg means business this time. Bragg’s team recently gathered up the phones of Trump’s estranged former attorney, Michael Cohen. They have reportedly warned Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, the elderly financier now serving out a five-month sentence on Rikers Island after admitting financial crimes, that he could face fresh charges in an otherwise unrelated insurance matter if he refuses to cooperate with Bragg’s prosecutors. And they’ve begun calling in witnesses from the Trump Organization, his 2016 campaign, and the National Enquirer. 

Now, the question now becomes what Bragg will decide to do, and when. 

Trump has repeatedly denied ever having an affair with Daniels, and re-upped his denial Tuesday on his social media site, Truth Social. 

“NEVER HAD AN AFFAIR,” Trump wrote. “This is old news!” 

Return of Stormy

Daniels has described her alleged encounters with Trump down to the lurid minutiae, including a highly unflattering description of Trump’s anatomy. 

Those and other details of the case have been widely known for years—in part because Cohen, likewise, already admitted to his role in the hush-money payment scheme that bought Daniels’ silence right before the 2016 election. 

Cohen entered a guilty plea in August 2018 for his part in helping to orchestrate hush-money payments to both Daniels and another woman who claimed she had an affair with Trump, former Playboy model Karen McDougal. 

Cohen admitted sending $130,000 to Daniels’ lawyer on Oct. 27, 2016 through a shell company he created called Essential Consultants. Cohen was reimbursed after Trump won the presidency in a series of checks signed by Trump.

Cohen confessed to breaking federal election laws by effectively orchestrating undisclosed donations to Trump’s presidential campaign. And at the time, federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York said the payoffs were committed “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” meaning Trump, shortly before the 2016 election.

But despite this signal that prosecutors believed Trump was behind the scheme, they never charged him. Instead, SDNY prosecutors decided they could not charge a sitting president with a crime due to a Department of Justice policy, and they later closed the case. 

Near the end of Trump’s presidency, members of the team discussed the possibility of going after Trump once he left the White House, according to CNN legal analyst Eli Honig’s book, Untouchable. 

They decided not to charge Trump, however, in part, because not all of the prosecutors in the office agreed on the strength of the case, according to Honig. And what’s more, Trump was in the middle of another, even bigger scandal: the Capitol uprising of Jan. 6 2021. That deadly episode “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison,” Honig wrote. 

The team was also wary of the intense political blowback they’d face if they charged a former American president for the first time in history. A source told Honig: “We were well aware of the prudential reasons why you wouldn’t charge a president, even after he was out of office.”

Trump’s money man

Bragg, however, has taken a new interest in the old case, for reasons that remain unclear. 

The renewed momentum comes shortly after Bragg successfully prosecuted Trump’s company for paying fringe benefits to senior executives off the books. 

Bragg is reportedly looking at whether the methods used by Trump’s company to account for the hush-money payments may have violated New York State laws against false record keeping. Court documents from Cohen’s case indicate that Trump’s company categorized the reimbursement payments as legal expenses. 

Now, Bragg is reportedly putting fresh pressure on the same financier who played a starring role in the criminal trial of the Trump Organization: Trump’s longtime top money man, Weisselberg. 

Bragg’s team recently warned Weisselberg, who is currently incarcerated for taking off-the-books benefits that minimized his taxes, that he could be charged in a new insurance fraud investigation if he doesn’t agree to cooperate with Bragg’s office, according to both the Times and Bloomberg News.

The insurance matter isn’t directly related to the hush money. Instead, it goes back to events laid out in a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Trump’s company last September. That filing alleges that Weisselberg lied to an insurance company about the method of assessing the value of the Trump Organization’s real estate holdings by claiming they had been evaluated by an independent appraiser. 

Weisselberg’s attorney, Nicholas Gravante, didn’t return a request for comment from VICE News.

Weisselberg has a long history of interacting with prosecutors during the various probes of Trump’s business affairs over the years. His current five-month sentence resulted in part from his refusal to fully cooperate with the Manhattan DA’s case against Trump’s company while agreeing to testify at the company’s trial. 

Some independent observers have expressed skepticism about this potential case, however, including the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, who noted that prosecutors would have to overcome questions about the statute of limitations in the case. 

The limit for felonies in New York State is generally five years, which might seem to leave Trump in the clear for these events that transpired around the 2016 election. But the statute of limitations can be extended if the defendant lived “continuously outside this state.” Trump spent four years in Washington D.C. after assuming the presidency in 2017.

What’s more, Bragg’s team might need to rely on the testimony of Cohen, who has admitted telling lies on Trump’s behalf. 

A new book published on Tuesday by Mark Pomerantz, a former special assistant to the Manhattan DA, claims that Bragg “could not see a world” in which he would rely on Cohen to prosecute Trump. 

Regardless, Bragg now seems to be moving forward with the case, making it one more important point of legal jeopardy for Trump.