This Looks Crooked from Every Angle

The thing that bothers me about Michael Cohen's statement that he is the guy who paid Stormy Daniels for no particular reason whatsoever is that the fact that he paid her at all is really amazingly coincidental with his client, one Donald J. Trump, having been implicated in an affair with this woman, and in the throes of an election where the most recent scuttlebutt alleged that he was a womanizer, when this pay-off happened. He can try to pretend-separate this from the campaign, but there is no more obvious reason for this payoff than that the Trump campaign would prefer to not have another woman talk about his extra-marital sex bidness.

I think this right there is stupid, because we know now, after the election, that Trump's philandering was never a problem for his voters. He was accused of sexual harassment and rape during the election. I'm not sure how Stormy Daniels' story was going to be some kind of "too much". Coming on the heels of the several kinds of harassment and assault allegations happening just then, which Trump had no problem denying, I don't know why her story would have represented a damaging bit of pile-on that needed to be monetarily hushed.

Cohen alleges that his financial facilitation of a payment (through the creation of an LLC to sort of, shall we say, launder that monetary "gift") was done entirely without any coordination with the Trump Campaign or the Trump Foundation.

Yah right--and he isn't also suing Buzzfeed because of the Steele Dossier.  Cohen is a fixer, and he does shit for Trump whether it is really good shit to do or not. I kind of wonder whether he has significantly fuxxored himself by admitting he has paid for Stormy Daniels in lots of ways--he should not be offering his financial assistance to some client who is not indigent to influence any potential case--and Trump should seriously be staking his own bribes, right?  This is basic lack of lawyering ethics.

Also, this is either a bribe or a material boost to the Trump campaign because it pretend-refutes damaging info for the Trump Campaign.  Totally an in-kind donation, you might think?

I don't even know. Cohen strikes me as a bad actor anyway. I definitely don't give credence to his story.