Dem operatives knew about Stormy Daniels story 7 years before hush-money payoff: reporter
April 03, 2023
Former President Donald Trump's indictment in New York stems from an alleged $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the run-up to the 2016 election – money he's accused of paying to cover up an extramarital affair the two had.
But some Democratic operatives in Louisiana had already known about the affair in 2009 — making the entire scheme potentially pointless, conservative Washington Examiner columnist Quinn Hillyer told CNN Monday.
"So interesting," said anchor Jake Tapper. "Stormy Daniels first disclosed her alleged encounter with Donald Trump in 2009, as you wrote in your column, when she was doing a kind of, like, a fake run for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana."
"Yes," said Hillyer. "A couple of sort of out-of-work twenty-something Democratic political operatives were just trying to cause trouble, really. And David Vitter, the Republican incumbent, had had a sex scandal with a prostitute. So they said, let's find some sex workers to run against him, just almost as a lark, and somebody said, Stormy Daniels is from Louisiana, let's get her.
"And lo and behold, she said she would do it, and they were sitting in a hotel lobby going through her phone, figuring who they could get some campaign donations from, and very nonchalantly, she was naming porn executives and stuff like that, and then she said, oh, wait. Donald Trump. Yeah, I've got his number right here. At least I've got his top aide's number.
"That f----r should give me some money. And it was very nonchalant. And so Democratic operatives have known about it since 2009. She went on two years later to give this long interview with In Touch magazine. So why did Donald Trump, in 2016, pay her money to hush up something that was already very public and quite well known? It's crazy."
"The other point that's interesting is that this does also seem to bolster the credibility of Stormy Daniels' story, which Donald Trump to this day is denying," said Tapper. "Even though I think most people probably think it happened."
"Well, it's axiomatic that if somebody claiming a long-ago sexual encounter or sexual abuse cases, as it might be, if they have some contemporary evidence or told people about it more contemporaneously, rather than having just, you know, apparently made it up on the spot umpteen years later, then that adds to credibility," said Hillyer. "And the fact that she was telling these Democratic operatives this in 2009, and there's an email train to prove it, that tends to bolster the credibility because she wasn't doing it to try to stop Trump from being president.
"This was seven years before he ran for president, and she was just nonchalantly mentioning this encounter and giving the exact same details that she is giving now. That's what that sort of contemporaneous verification, that at least she didn't do it for political reasons, she was just sort of talking, mentioning Trump in the midst of mentioning a lot of other rich people that she knew."
Watch the video at this link.
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