Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at watchdog group Common Cause, told me. “There’s a saying among criminal prosecutors: You build a wall brick by brick,” Paul S. But they could be one piece of evidence in a potential case against Trump.
And we’ve known for quite some time that Trump reimbursed Cohen for this afterward.īut the big unanswered question is whether prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York hope to pursue the hush money case further - by implicating the Trump Organization or even the president himself.Īccording to legal and campaign finance experts, the checks themselves don’t prove a crime.
Cohen pleaded guilty last year to violating campaign finance law by paying off Daniels shortly before the election. The checks don’t change the basic facts at issue in the hush money scandal. The former attorney to President Donald Trump publicly released several personal checks meant to reimburse Cohen for his hush payments to Stormy Daniels - including some signed by the president himself. Michael Cohen’s dramatic congressional testimony last week came with a vivid visual aid.