Trump Personally Ordered Effort To Silence Stormy Daniels: WSJ

NEW YORK CITY—Despite his initial claims that he knew nothing about his then-lawyer Michael Cohen’s attempts to keep AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels quiet about their 2006 sexual encounter, Donald Trump in fact personally ordered that efforts be taken to silence Daniels, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday. In February of this year, according to the report, Trump told Cohen in a phone call that he was concerned Daniels was planning to discuss the encounter in a media interview, and that Cohen should file a restraining order against her, the Journal reported, according a CNN account. "Don't worry, I'll pay for everything," Trump told Cohen in the call, the paper reported. The job of drawing up the legal paperwork to silence Daniels fell to a California-based Trump Organzation attorney, Jill Martin, who later issued a public statement saying that she had drawn up an arbitration deal targeted at Daniels in her own “individual capacity.” "The Trump Organization is not representing anyone, with the exception of one of its California-based attorneys in her individual capacity facilitating the initial filing,” Martin said in a statement at the time. “The company has had no involvement in the matter.” But that just wasn’t true, according to the Journal story. In fact, the paper reported, Trump’s son Eric Trump, who is now in charge of the Trump Organization while Trump occupied the Oval Office, had a hand in drafting the restraining order against Daniels—which she ultimately ignored, speaking repeatedly in public about the affair. Eric Trump also advised Martin on how to respond to media inquiries when news of the restraining order against Daniels leaked to the press, according to the story. But as Daniels continued to disregard the legal efforts to keep her quiet, and Cohen ultimately pleaded guilty to a felony campaign finance offense stemming from the $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels—admitting in court that Trump ordered him to make the payment—Trump gave up on legal efforts to keep Daniels quiet, filing court papers saying that the non-disclosure deal with Daniels was never valid in the first place, as AVN.com reported.  Not only has Daniels ignored Trump’s pressure on her to stay quiet by granting media interviews, she authored a book discussing her affair with Trump in excruciating detail, including a vivid description of Trump’s penis, describing Trump’s genitalia as having “a huge mushroom head, like a toadstool,” and resembling “the mushroom character in Mario Kart,” AVN.com reported.  The book, Full Disclosure, was published on Tuesday. According to media reports, Daniels reveals that Trump showed her a picture of his then-newborn son Barron just before the two had sex in a Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room in 2006. Photo by Michel Temer / Wikimedia Commons