Well, that didn’t take long. In my Saturday NR column, I noted that, while there are at least seven Trump investigations ongoing, there were certain to be more in the coming weeks and months. By early Monday morning, the New York Times was reporting that there is an eighth.
The new one is really an old one — a revival of the Manhattan district attorney’s probe of Trump’s business practices. That investigation appeared to have cratered earlier this year, as I detailed in February. It appears that the bulk of the matter will remain dormant — i.e., the part that hinged on former DA Cyrus Vance Jr.’s quest to compel production of Donald Trump’s personal financial records (requiring two trips to the Supreme Court). Clearly, those records did not turn out to be the mother lode that prosecutors hoped for. So, what’s reportedly getting a “jump-start,” as the Times puts it, is L’affaire Stormy Daniels. That’s the allegation that, during the 2016 campaign, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former “fixer” (as Cohen described his role), paid hush money to porn actress Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels is her, er, stage name) to conceal a tryst she says she had with Trump. Cohen has related that, at Trump’s direction, he paid Clifford $130,000 and was subsequently reimbursed by the Trump Organization, which employed curious bookkeeping that did not disclose the true reason for the payment. Trump has acknowledged the payment and the nondisclosure arrangement but denied — not very convincingly — both the fling and any nexus between his campaign for the presidency and the hush money paid a few days before the election to conceal an encounter said to have happened a decade earlier.
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