F.E.C. Ends Probe Into Trump 'Hush' Payment to Stormy Daniels

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The three-year battle over the legality of a "hush" payment made to adult star Stormy Daniels by Donald J. Trump's then personal attorney Michael Cohen during Trump's 2016 Presidential run has come to an end.  As a number of news outlets are reporting, the Federal Election Commission announced Thursday that it officially shelved the case during a February meeting, in which the six-person commission voted on whether to continue its probe into the payment—a lump sum of $130,000 that Trump eventually reimbursed to Cohen—as a possible violation of campaign finance law. The commission is made up of three Republicans, two Democrats and one independent member; two of the Republican members voted to drop the case and the two Democratic members voted to push it forward, while the remaining Republican abstained and the independent was absent.  The payment at issue was made to Daniels in an attempt to secure a nondisclosure agreement with her regarding the sexual liaison she claims to have had with Trump after meeting him at a golf tournament in 2006. The payment was never reported in Trump's campaign filings, and the F.E.C. said in a December internal report that it had found "reason to believe" the Trump campaign had "knowingly and willfully" violated campaign finance laws through these actions. Watchdog groups that have sought to see Trump prosecuted over the matter have long argued that the payment constituted an illegal campaign contribution by Cohen, far exceeding the $2,700 cap for individuals.  Due to his involvement in the scandal, Cohen was convicted of breaking campaign finance laws, tax evasion and lying to Congress, and served a portion of his three-year sentence in federal prison; he is currently serving out the remainder of that term under home confinement. Trump has faced no legal consequences for the transaction. The New York Times reports that Trump issued a statement Friday thanking the F.E.C. for dropping "the phony case against me concerning payments to women relative to the 2016 presidential election." (Cohen also claims to have brokered a similar hush payment of $150,000 to former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.) Cohen made his own statement to the Times asserting, "The hush money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump. Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the F.E.C. committee could rule any other way is confounding." Agreed F.E.C. chairwoman Shana Broussard and commissioner Ellen Weintraub—the two Democrats who voted to move the case forward—in a joint letter quoted by the Times, "To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10-year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality." The two Republicans who voted to dismiss the case, Trey Trainor and Sean Cooksey, said in a joint statement under the F.E.C. letterhead that they "concluded that pursuing these matters further was not the best use of agency resources" and that "these matters were already statute-of-limitations imperiled," and thus they had "voted to dismiss these matters as an exercise of our prosecutorial discretion."