Trump Lawyer Tacopina Says Trump Didn’t ‘Lie’ About Stormy Daniels Payment, He Just Said Stuff That Wasn’t ‘True’

“A distinction without a difference” is the phrase that springs to mind. Liz Dye reports in Above the Law:

On Monday, Donald Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina went on Good Morning America to explain that his client, a man who was notorious for his infidelities even before he got caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Stormy Daniels. In fact, he went so far as to say that Trump had been a “victim of extortion,” paying the porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter that never happened to avoid embarrassing his family.

It was merely a coincidence of timing that Trump tried to bury Daniels’s story of their 2006 encounter — and at least two other stories as well — just months before the 2016 election. And thus, the lawyer insisted, the hush money payment cannot be seen as an excessive, undisclosed contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign.

The problem with that theory, aside from being fundamentally ridiculous, is that there are a whole bunch of witnesses who can testify otherwise, including: former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and editor Dylan Howard, who conspired with Trump and his campaign to “catch and kill” embarrassing stories; Stormy Daniels’s first lawyer, Keith Davidson, who negotiated the hush money agreement; Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the deal, as well as several other illegal tax schemes; and Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who discussed the payment scheme with Cohen at least once. And every one of those people has testified to the grand jury impaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to investigate the payment.

Donald Trump has not testified, although he was invited to do so. But, as the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery points out, Trump was not given the automatic grant of immunity provided to grand jury witnesses, indicating both that he is the target of the investigation, and that this process is speeding toward its inevitable close.

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical that an indictment will be forthcoming here, not least of which is that . . .

Continue reading.