US President Donald Trump is insisting that the “hush money” he paid to two women who say he had affairs with did not break any election campaign rules.
Trump hit back at his former lawyer Michael Cohen who has pleaded guilty to violating laws during the 2016 presidential election over his use of hush money.
Speaking to Fox & Friends, Trump said the money was “not a campaign violation”.
“They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me. And I tweeted about it. You know, I put – I don’t know if you know but I tweeted about the payments. But they didn’t come out of the campaign,” he said.
“But they weren’t – that’s not a – it’s not even a campaign violation. If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation but he had a different attorney general and they viewed it a lot differently.”
This contradicts Cohen, who in July released audio tapes of him and the President allegedly discussing one of the payments previous to the election.
Cohen as admitted to passing on funds to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels. He said that Trump had repaid him for the $130,000 received by Daniels.
The funds were not reported to the Federal Election Commission during the campaign.
Of course, Trump has repeatedly taken to Twitter to defend himself. On Wednesday evening he tweeted: “The only thing that I have done wrong is to win an election that was expected to be won by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. The problem is, they forgot to campaign in numerous states!”