Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, is relishing her moment of revenge.
The adult-film star whose alleged affair with Donald Trump was at the
center of lawyer Michael Cohen’s plea deal with federal prosecutors took
to Twitter in the middle of Tuesday’s firestorm to briefly reveal her
delight.
“How ya like me now?!” she tweeted.
Daniels also thanked her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has become a
fixture in media coverage of the Cohen saga. Avenatti has vowed to end
Trump’s presidency and is entertaining a White House run in 2020. In the
near term, he is seeking to depose Trump in Daniels’s main civil case
against the president.
“We’ve tolerated quite a number of personal attacks over the last six
months,” Avenatti said in an interview Wednesday, the day after Cohen
pleaded guilty to eight charges, including tax evasion and violations of
campaign finance laws. “I have tolerated a lot of criticism of the way I
have approached this case and the fact that I’ve tried it in the media,
and it is very satisfying to see the result, which I know would not
have occurred but for the efforts of my client and I.”
Daniels and Avenatti, two characters in the national drama over Trump’s
alleged affairs and efforts to keep them quiet, celebrated the
unequivocally bad day for Trump and Cohen. Of greater significance to
the presidency, Cohen’s guilty plea could strengthen one of their civil
cases against Trump, increasing the president’s legal vulnerability and
echoing the litigation that led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment
by the House in 1998.
President Trump’s former lawyer
Michael Cohen pleaded guilty Aug. 21 to eight violations of banking, tax
and campaign finance laws.
In an extraordinary statement, Cohen told a federal court Tuesday that
Trump directed him to pay off women with whom he had had alleged affairs
ahead of the 2016 election to keep their stories out of the media. The
plea directly implicated the president, and Cohen said he violated
campaign finance law at Trump’s direction “for the principal purpose of
influencing the election.”
Legal experts said Cohen’s statement could strengthen Daniels’s primary
case and accelerate its movement through a federal court, creating the
opportunity for Avenatti to depose Trump.
“My sense is that Avenatti is going to be able to get his white whale,”
said Andy Wright, a former litigator and an associate White House
counsel in the Obama administration.
Daniels is suing Trump to void the 2016 nondisclosure agreement that
formally binds her from speaking about their alleged affair. She is also
bringing a defamation case over a Trump tweet accusing her of a “con
job” after Daniels said she was threatened in 2011 to keep silent about
their relationship.
Trump’s “main potential legal liability stems from two things — one,
from the information Michael Cohen might be able to provide, and two,
the information that I may ultimately be able to disclose to the
American public,” Avenatti said.
Daniels did not respond to requests for an interview.
Wright said Cohen’s plea casts the debate over the nondisclosure agreement — NDA, in legal shorthand — in a new light.
“If the NDA was part of a criminal conspiracy, then that’s going to very
strongly bolster the idea that the contract itself might be void. . . .
The NDA was basically the instrument of the payoff in the illegal
scheme to protect the electoral interests, under that theory,” he said.
Trump faces a separate defamation suit in New York state from Summer
Zervos, a former contestant on his old reality show, “The Apprentice,”
who said he lied after she claimed he forcibly kissed and groped her in
Los Angeles in 2007. The president has denied both Zervos’s and
Daniels’s allegations.
These civil cases have operated under the radar compared with special
counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference
in the 2016 presidential election and potential involvement of the Trump
campaign. But the lawsuits are poised to draw the spotlight as
plaintiffs seek to compel testimony from a sitting president.
Trump would be only the fifth president to be deposed while in office,
according to legal experts. The last was former president Clinton.
Avenatti indicated this week that he expects U.S. District Judge S.
James Otero in Los Angeles to lift his stay in Daniels’s nondisclosure
agreement case, allowing their side to begin discovery.
“I would hope to be able to depose Cohen before Dec. 1,” Avenatti said.
“We want both of these depositions to take place as quickly as possible.
So we’re going to be pushing. I would take the depositions tomorrow if I
was permitted to. We anticipate that they are going to oppose our
efforts to depose both of them, so it could be a number of months.”
Otero denied Avenatti’s request for Trump to sit for a deposition in
March and delayed the case while the federal investigation into Cohen,
who is named as a defendant, concluded in New York. The next scheduling
conference is set to take place Sept. 10.
Avenatti is likely to face opposition as he pushes for the deposition to actually take place.
“Michael is correct that this type of allegation [by Cohen] can strengthen a demand for a deposition.
However, it’s very difficult to expedite depositions with sitting
presidents,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington
University Law School.
“It took a considerable length of time to finally get Bill Clinton in
that chair,” he said. “The courts are highly deferential to the schedule
and the demands of the presidency.”
Trump could be headed for a deposition sooner in New York. In June, a
judge there ruled that he could be deposed in Zervos’s case and ordered
that the interview take place by early 2019. If that timetable holds,
the lawsuit could be headed to trial next summer.
Overshadowing each legal fight is the Paula Jones case, in which Jones, a
former employee of the state of Arkansas, sued Clinton for alleged
sexual harassment in 1994. The Supreme Court found that Clinton was not
immune from civil litigation as a sitting president, and it was
Clinton’s false statement during a deposition denying he had sex with a
White House intern that led to his impeachment.
A deposition “creates real legal risk for Donald Trump,” Wright said.
“They’ve been operating under this idea that it’s not a crime to lie to the American people,” he said.
“That may be true, but when you have a [deposition] transcript out there
showing that you made statements contrary to what you said in the past,
you have exposure to perjury.”
No matter what Trump says in a deposition, “even if he says the
absolute, 100 percent truth,” he could still be at risk of a perjury
indictment, given his past statements, Wright said.
Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.
