Common Cause says the alleged payment amounted to an in-kind donation to Donald Trump's presidential campaign that should have been disclosed. | Evan Vucci/AP photo Alleged payment to porn star was illegal donation to Trump campaign, watchdog says The call from Common Cause for criminal prosecution echoes charges against John Edwards.

A watchdog group filed a pair of complaints on Monday alleging that a $130,000 payment reportedly made to a pornographic film actress who claims to have had an affair with Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws.

In submissions to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission, Common Cause said the alleged payment to Stephanie Clifford — who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels — amounted to an in-kind donation to Trump's presidential campaign that should have been publicly disclosed in its official reports.


An attorney for Common Cause, Paul Ryan, said the payment appeared to be hush money. He compared the situation to the series of events that resulted in the prosecution of former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) over nearly $1 million in payments allegedly made to cover up an affair he had with videographer Rielle Hunter during his 2008 presidential bid.

“The purpose is the heart of all this,” Ryan said. “It’s pretty obvious this payment to Ms. Clifford was intended to keep her quiet just weeks before the election so she would not damage the candidate’s effort to win the election.”

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Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, said the complaints were without merit.

“The Common Cause complaint is baseless along with the allegation that President Trump filed a false report to the FEC,” Cohen said in a statement.

In a statement last week after The Wall Street Journal first reported the payment , Cohen did not address the alleged transfer of funds or its purpose, but said the president denied any affair.

“President Trump once again vehemently denies any such occurrence as has Ms. Daniels,” Cohen said, referring to a written statement Daniels signed insisting that here had been no such relationship.

Asked about the matter during a trip to Israel on Monday, Vice President Mike Pence told The Associated Press he was “not going to comment on the latest baseless allegations against the president.”

In 2011, Edwards was indicted on charges that he accepted illegal campaign contributions in the form of payments that wealthy donors had made to pay travel, hotel, medical and housing expenses Hunter incurred after becoming pregnant with Edwards’ child. The travel included secretive charter flights arranged to keep Hunter’s pregnancy a secret.

At Edwards’ trial, his lawyers insisted that he didn’t know about the payments and that the former senator’s desire to keep the affair secret stemmed from a concern about upsetting his wife, Elizabeth, who was suffering from cancer and died in 2010.

A jury acquitted Edwards on one charge and couldn’t reach verdicts on the others, although jurors said the votes were 8-4 in Edwards’ favor on the remaining counts of illegal contribution and 11-1 on his causing the filing of a false campaign finance report.

The Justice Department quickly announced it would not retry the case.

During the trial, Edwards’ defense attorneys emphasized that during a routine audit the Federal Election Commission considered whether the payments for Hunter’s expenses should be considered campaign donations. The commission closed the audit without insisting that the money be included in Edwards’ reports.

Don McGahn, who at the time was member of the Federal Election Commission and is now Trump’s White House counsel, made clear he did not think the payments amounted to campaign donations.

McGahn, at a 2011 FEC meeting, concluded that the gifts were “not reportable,” also saying that it would be “odd” to deem such payments as gifts to Edwards’ campaign.

Asked about that statement, Ryan said: “That was Don McGahn’s view. … I don't think that was a formal position of the commission. … He’s wrong. Not just in my opinion, but the DOJ thought he was wrong.”

Ryan said Edwards’ partial acquittal and the prosecutors’ failure to convict him didn’t undermine the Justice Department’s obligation to investigate the alleged payment to Clifford.

“I think DOJ was right to indict Edwards and I think DOJ should look into this matter as well,” the Common Cause official said.

However, Jan Baran, a GOP campaign finance lawyer, called the reasoning of the Common Cause complaint “fallacious.”

“The money spent for Edwards in 2004 or for Trump in 2016 is not covered by the election law,” Baran said. “As the jury concluded in the Edwards case, money spent for a candidate is not necessarily money spent for a campaign and, therefore, is not a regulated contribution or expenditure. Both times the purpose of the expense was highly personal, to say the least, and not campaign related in the legal sense.”

Ryan acknowledged that if the $130,000 came from Trump, he was free to spend that money to benefit his campaign as part of the self-funding of much of his presidential bid. However, reporting laws may still have been violated, the attorney said.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FEC did not respond to requests for comment on the complaints.

The complaint that Common Cause sent to the Justice Department is addressed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Sessions announced last March that he was recusing himself from all matters related to the 2016 presidential campaign.

