Putting myself in Michael Cohen’s shoes and adopting his ethical framework, I can’t begin to understand why he handled the Stormy Daniels pay off the way he did from beginning to present.
First, if Trump dropped the stormy problem in my lap, I’d have said “geez boss, why don’t we just ignore her. You got tramps coming outta the woodwork trying to nick you. What’s one more broad gonna hurt?”
And if Trump has said: “no, this one has got the goods and needs to be bought off,” I’d have said “okay but we’re going to be facing possible campaign contribution violations if we aren’t real careful.”
Then I’d say “the only way we can try to get around this is to have the money come straight from you, but if you don’t want to have to report it as campaign spending we have to make it purely personal, which is a problem with it being so close to the election and all. The only way we can try to square that is to make it about Stormy’s highly motivated to sell because her story is more valuable now than it will ever be, but you don’t give a shit about how she’s going to impact the election. You’re just worried about how it’ll make Melania feel and it’s keeping you up at night. So you just start sending me emails telling me just that, and we’ll use those emails to square things later if necessary.”
Having bungled things so badly at the outset, I really can’t understand why Cohen felt the need to even acknowledge that any payment had been made, let alone concoct the obviously bullshit story that he’d paid Stormy off with his own money, which, in addition to being implausible was also incriminating both for himself and Trump.
And now Giuliani leaps into the breach and rather than offering up some lies to cover Trump’s rump. He first offers up a lie that does nothing to explain why Trump tried to buy Stormy off so close to the election if it wasn’t to help him win the election. Then he more or less admits that he did it in order to help himself win the election. If he was going to lie, why not tell a helpful lie, i.e., the timing was driven by Stormy’s desperation to sell before the election, not Trump’s desire shut her up before the election. Trump’s only concern was Melania’s feelings. It’s the only remotely plausible non-campaign-finance-violating explanation.
Some parting words of wisdom for Giuliani: