Relevant lies: Cohen didn't need to mortgage his home, nor did he need Trump to reimburse him
If all had gone according to plan, there would have been no direct financial ties to Trump or his campaign from paying off Stormy with hush money. Trump was never expected to "reimburse" Cohen for the $130,000 "he" paid Stormy. If Trump never "reimbursed" Cohen, he never would have had to include that payment in his financial disclosures, avoiding the hot water that disclosure plunged him into. So clearly that was never a part of the plan. Just as clearly Cohen was never going to use a second mortgage on his home to pay off a porn star so a billionaire didn't have to. IF Cohen took out that loan at all, it was part of the grand cover up. The timing in telling.
Cohen set up a shell corporation and the first thing it did was pay out money for a non disclosure agreement with a woman Trump "cheated with". And so for all practical appearances to the world, should it ever come to light, that seemed to be the purpose of that shell corporation, small potatoes involving personal digressions. Maybe Cohen did take out a second mortgage and used that money to pay off Stormy - for a week or so before the real money started flowing in. If the hush money payment ever came to light Cohen would have a paper trail to back up the cover up, a loan agreement from some bank.
If a concerned "law-enforcement official" with personal integrity had not leaked the SAR that highlighted all the suspicious "influence peddling" (it could be much worse than that) that Cohen engaged in through that very same shell corporation after using it to pay off Stormy, the story might have stayed frozen with a lame, bogus but difficult to disprove falsehood. Namely, A) the shell corporation was only intended for funneling NDA payoffs, B) Cohen fronted the money for Stormy's payoff through refinancing his home expecting to be reimbursed from Trump and C) that Michael Cohen so loves Donald Trump that all he did was let leak his "disappointment" that Trump never paid him back for mortgaging his home.
This is all classic Trump. It has always been his priority to profit off of everything he touches, and never spend a personal dime if he can somehow avoid it. He pays for his own privileges with other people's money. When Trump ran his own "charity" he took all the credit for anything it donated to while getting other people, firms etc. to donate all the money that it gave away, often at events held at his own properties which he collected rent from. When Trump ran for President, after boasting about his ability to "self fund", his major contribution to his campaign was the use of his own properties for office space and events - which got billed to the RNC and to the donors to his campaign. Do you think Donald Trump would spend his own money to silence women he fucked (both literally and figuratively) when he could tap other peoples money instead?
I have no doubt that Michael Cohen's personal "loan" was repaid many times over from money received through the same corporate shell that was used to pay off Stormy Daniels. I also have no doubt that Donald Trump personally profited from the millions that subsequently poured into it. Trump knows some of the best money launderers in the business. Money laundering can almost always be uncovered IF someone with the right tools goes digging for it. You know, tools like subpoenas. Until then though it usually remains safely hidden below the surface, buried along with his tax returns. And that is exactly where Trump (and Cohen) expected all of this to stay; before he encountered the full powers of a vastly competent Office of Special Prosecutor.
Maybe if Trump wasn't so cheap as to give Stormy only a paltry $130,000 (along with personal intimidation) to stay quiet, he could have side stepped much more serious matters from ever coming to light. Or maybe were Trump a little less vain and narcissistic, he could have quietly released Stormy from her NDA, suffered a few far less embarrassing hits than his pussy grabbing tape already brought him, and thus skated past the fast brewing storm that increasingly now engulfs him. But that would be behavior out of character for a man who boasts he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.
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