President Trump inaccurately insisted Wednesday that no crimes were committed when Michael Cohen issued hush payments to two women who say they had sex with Trump over a decade ago.

“They didn’t come out of the campaign,” Trump said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” set to air in full Thursday. “It’s not even a campaign violation.”

Trump claimed — falsely — that no campaign finance laws were broken because he personally reimbursed Cohen for the payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal. Both women say they slept with Trump in 2006, just weeks after First Lady Melania gave birth to the President’s youngest son, Barron.

Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the President doesn’t seem to understand what he’s talking about.


“That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the law,” Bookbinder, whose organization has filed several ethics-violation lawsuits against Trump, told the Daily News. “It’s not a question of the money coming out of the campaign but the money going into the campaign. The payments were made for the benefit of the campaign.”

Contrary to Trump’s assertions, Bookbinder explained the payments to Daniels and McDougal violated campaign finance laws since Cohen testified in court Tuesday he issued them with the explicit purpose of “influencing” the 2016 election. Thereby, the payments constituted illegal in-kind campaign contributions.

Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, also directly implicated the President in the campaign finance crimes, confessing the preelection payoffs were issued at his “direction” and “in coordination” with him.

Even though he inaccurately denies crimes were committed, the President expanded on Cohen’s guilty plea Wednesday, acknowledging the payments to McDougal and Daniels “came from me.”


In his guilty plea, Cohen only admitted he was reimbursed for the payoffs by submitting bogus invoices to the Trump Organization.

Walter Shaub, who served as the government’s top ethics czar until July 2017, pointed out the significance of Trump’s admission.

“Welp, I guess Trump’s interview with Fox News today answers this question. He says he paid,” Shaub tweeted. “So he knowingly omitted his debt to Cohen from the financial disclosure report he filed in June 2017. In any past administration, this would be a huge story. Everything is relative now.”

In another apparent contradiction, Trump acknowledged during the interview that he found out about the hush payments “later on.”


In April, Trump denied having any knowledge of the $130,000 payment to Daniels. “No,” the President bluntly told reporters on board Air Force One at the time.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied Wednesday afternoon that Trump has lied to the American people, claiming that’s a “ridiculous accusation.”

Bookbinder speculated Trump’s inaccurate denial is part of a broader game plan.

“The President’s strategy all throughout has been to confuse people so that nobody is sure what the answer is,” Bookbinder said. “I think he has a sense that if there’s enough versions out there people will just shrug and say who knows what’s actually true.”


He added, “It’s a PR strategy that somehow has worked pretty well for him.”