Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, is suing to break free of a confidentiality agreement she reached with Cohen, 11 days before the 2016 presidential election. She said Cohen paid her $130,000 to remain silent about the alleged 2006 sexual tryst with the future president.
Trump’s allies have denied the affair.
Cohen has said he used a home-equity line of credit to arrange the payment and was not reimbursed by the Trump campaign or the Trump Organization. He has not answered questions about whether Trump paid him back.
On Thursday, Trump appeared to complicate matters in both Daniels’ case and in the legal battle he and Cohen are waging in the New York case.
In an interview on Fox & Friends, he acknowledged for the first time that Cohen represented him in what Trump called “this crazy Stormy Daniels deal.” That appeared to contradict Trump’s statement earlier this month that he did not know about the payoffat the time it occurred or the source of the money.
He also told Fox that Cohen represented him in only a “tiny, tiny little fraction” of his overall legal work. Within hours, federal prosecutors in New York seized on Trump’s televised remarks as evidence that few records seized in the FBI raids of Cohen’s home and offices were protected by attorney-client privilege.
Trump and Cohen had argued that they needed to screen the seized materials for privileged communications before prosecutors could view them.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood appointed a special master, former federal judge Barbara Jones, to help determine whether any of the seized materials are protected.
Article Appeared @https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/27/stormy-daniels-lawsuit-delayed-judge-michael-cohen-indictement-donald-trump/559805002/