Stormy Daniels’ ‘Credibility Issues’ Reflect a Broader Problem With Key Witnesses Against Trump
On July 13, 2006, Stormy Daniels says, she had sex with former President Donald Trump in his suite at the Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino, where he was staying during the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship. At the time, Daniels was a 27-year-old porn star who had started writing and directing adult films, and Trump was a 60-year-old billionaire real estate developer who had gained renewed celebrity as the star of the NBC reality TV show The Apprentice. He had married his third wife, former model and future First Lady Melania Trump, the previous year, and their son was four months old.
A decade later, shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels agreed to keep quiet about that alleged 2006 encounter in exchange for a $130,000 payment from Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer. That agreement is at the center of Trump’s first and possibly last criminal trial, in which Daniels testified this week at the New York County Criminal Courthouse in Manhattan. In trying to peddle her story to the press as Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, Daniels told the jury, “My motivation wasn’t money. It was to get the story out.”
That implausible claim illustrates a broader problem that the prosecution faces in trying to establish that Trump committed 34 felonies by disguising his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen’s payment to Daniels as legal fees. Even leaving aside the convoluted, legally dubious theory underlying those charges, prosecutors are relying on the testimony of several key witnesses who do not seem trustworthy.
Daniels said she decided to go public with her story in early October 2016, when The Washington Post published a 2005 video in which Trump bragged to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about what he could get away with as a celebrity. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women],” Trump said. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything—grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Prosecutors have emphasized the importance of that recording in understanding why Trump was eager to silence Daniels. His motivation, in turn, is crucial to the argument that the hush payment was a campaign expenditure, that Cohen therefore made an excessive campaign contribution by fronting the money, and that Trump falsified business records to cover up that crime.
“Those were Donald Trump’s words on a video that was released one month before Election Day,” lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said in his opening statement. “And the impact of that tape on the campaign was immediate and explosive. Prominent allies withdrew their endorsements; they condemned Donald Trump’s language….The Republican National Committee even considered whether it was too late to replace their own nominee and find another candidate for the election a month before Election Day.”
Trump and his campaign staff “were deeply concerned that the tape would irreparably damage his viability as a candidate and reduce his standing with female voters in particular,” Colangelo told the jury. So the next day, when Cohen learned from David Pecker, then the CEO of the company that owned the National Enquirer, that Daniels was pitching her story, Trump “was adamant that he did not want the story to come out. Another story about sexual infidelity, especially with a porn star, on the heels of the Access Hollywood tape, could have been devastating to his campaign.”
As Daniels tells it, she was equally determined to tell her story. Yet she ultimately decided that was less important th
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