Trump’s Inaccurate Claims About Cohen, Obama and Campaign Finance

On Fox on Thursday, President Donald Trump claimed that Michael D. Cohen pleaded guilty to counts that “aren’t a crime” and misleadingly compared the violations to infractions by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Ainsley Earhardt, “Fox & Friends” host: “Did you direct him to make the payments?”

Trump: “He made the deal. He made the deals.”

This is misleading.

Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer, made hush money payments before the 2016 election to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump: Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, and Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels. Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and other charges on Tuesday.

Trump’s suggestion that Cohen acted on his own is contradicted by court filings and by Cohen himself.

The events are described in court documents that do not name the two women. However, both McDougal and Clifford publicly discussed their stories; additionally, Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, has verified their identities in news media interviews.

Here’s the timeline:

In court, Cohen said he made those payments at Trump’s direction.

“I and the CEO of a media company at the request of the candidate worked together to keep an individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign from publicly disclosing this information,” he said Tuesday, referring to the payment to McDougal.

Referring to the payment to Clifford, Cohen continued: “In coordination with, and at the direction of the same candidate, I arranged to make a payment to the second individual with information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign to keep the individual from disclosing the information.”

Earhardt: “Did you know about the payments?”

Trump: “Later on I knew. Later on.”

This is disputed.

Cohen said in court that Trump coordinated and directed him to make the payments. Trump and his lawyers and representatives have given a number of conflicting statements on whether and when Trump was aware of the payments.

A recording of the two men speaking in September 2016 confirms that Trump was at least aware of the hush money paid to McDougal before Cohen reimbursed AMI that October.

“I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David,” Cohen said in the recording, most likely referring to David J. Pecker, chairman of AMI and a friend of Trump’s. “And I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with —”

“So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump responded. That is believed to refer to the $150,000 payment to McDougal.

Trump: “And by the way, he pled to two counts that aren’t a crime, which nobody understands. In fact, I watched a number of shows. Sometimes you get some pretty good information by watching shows. Those two counts aren’t even a crime. They weren’t campaign finance.”

False.

The two counts are, in fact, crimes. Cohen pleaded guilty to two felonies: “willfully causing an unlawful corporate contribution” and “making an excessive campaign contribution.”

The first violates a campaign finance law that prohibits corporations from directly contributing to a campaign (they are allowed to contribute through other entities like political action committees). The second violates a law that limits individual contributions to a candidate to $2,700.

Trump: “If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation, but he had a different attorney general and they viewed it a lot differently.”

This is misleading.

Trump is comparing a civil violation to Cohen’s felony.

In January 2013, Obama’s 2008 campaign paid a $375,000 penalty to the Federal Election Commission, largely for failing to file “48-Hour Notices.” FEC rules require campaigns to notify the commission of contributions totaling $1,000 or more within 48 hours of receiving them.

The Obama campaign was also cited for failing to refund some donors who had made excessive contributions in a timely manner, and for misreporting dates of contributions.

These violations denied voters access to this information before Election Day, said Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute. However, he said, they are not criminal offenses.

To date, the Obama campaign has not been formally charged or accused of committing a knowing and willful violation, which is the legal standard for an election offense to be prosecuted under the criminal code.

Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, said Trump’s comparison was unfair. The Obama campaign committed inadvertent infractions that were inevitable in large campaigns, Hasen said. (Republican campaigns, including Trump’s, have made similar paperwork mistakes.)

“That’s very different from saying that you know what the law is and you’re intentionally choosing to violate it and you’re covering your tracks,” Hasen said, referring to Cohen’s admitted crime.

The Justice Department also noted in guidelines issued in December that campaign finance violations “become crimes when they satisfy a monetary threshold and are committed with specific criminal intent” — a threshold that Cohen’s violations met on both fronts.

“Longest bull run in the history of the stock market, congratulations America!” — Trump Twitter post.

True, but ...

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has steadily risen for 3,453 days, arguably the longest record. But as The New York Times’ Matthew Phillips has reported:

There is some debate over whether this bull market technically deserves the award for the longest on record. Bull markets are defined as a stretch when the stock market rises without suffering a 20 percent drop.At issue is a market run from October 1990 to March 2000, a 3,452-day period that was preceded by a slump of 19.92 percent. Wednesday, despite the S&P 500’s ticking down 0.04 percent, was the current upswing’s 3,453rd day.

Statistical sticklers, though, don’t round up, in which case that earlier boom started in December 1987 — a 4,494-day stretch that would retain the crown.

It’s also worth noting that while shares soared 320 percent since March 2009, they rose by 417 percent in the 1990s boom. Furthermore, the current bull market began and largely occurred under Obama.

In addition, Trump made a number of other claims in the “Fox & Friends” interviewthat The Times has previously debunked:

— He misleadingly claimed Imran Awan, a former IT aide to House Democrats, “had all the information on Democrats” and “they don’t even have his computers or his servers.” (This refers to a conspiracy theory — which the Justice Department has debunked — about the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee.)

— He misleadingly accused NATO members of being “delinquent” on payments to the alliance. (This misrepresents how NATO functions and conflates several measures of the alliance’s military spending.)

— He falsely characterized the tax cuts he signed into law in December as “the biggest in history.” (Several rank higher.)

— He misleadingly boasted that his administration “already started” to build his border wall. (Construction has not begun.)

— He claimed that the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines would bring 48,000 jobs. (The vast majority are temporary.)

— He exaggerated the U.S. trade deficit with China as $507 billion. (It was $336 billion in 2017.)