Donald Trump, who was convicted in May of making a $130,000 hush money payment to former adult film star Stormy Daniels, tried to silence her again two months later, according to a report.
The Republican presidential nominee was found guilty of 34 charges of falsifying business records to disguise the payments to Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 election to keep her from talking about a sexual encounter she says they had a decade earlier.
The recent effort to buy Daniels’ silence occurred again in July as Trump was running for president and came during a discussion over money she owed him in a defamation case she brought against him, the New York Times reported.
The case was dismissed by the courts, and she was ordered to pay his legal fees.
Daniels agreed to pay about $600,000, slightly less than what Trump’s lawyer, Harry Ross, said she owed, the report said.
But Ross said he would accept the lower amount on the condition that Daniels agree not to talk about Trump in public and in private, the Times reported in what it described as a “hush-money discount.”
Ross took the proposal to Daniels’ legal team in July via a letter asking her to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would have prevented her from criticizing or discussing Trump or any encounters they had.
Ross said the former president would accept Daniels’ offer if she “agrees in writing to make no public or private statements related to any alleged past interactions with President Trump, or defamatory or disparaging statements about him, his businesses and/or any affiliates or his suitability as a candidate for president.”
But Daniels, who had testified at the criminal trial, written a book about her experience, and had become a vocal critic of Trump, balked at the nondisclosure agreement.
“It would be nonsense to put that toothpaste back in the tube, or even try to,” her lawyer Clark Brewster told the New York Times. “Nor would Stormy even consider that kind of muting of her voice.”
The newspaper said Brewster gave them the letter, which was among a cache of stolen material sent to media outlets over the summer.
Prosecutors said Iran had hacked into communications between Trump’s aides and associates and made them public.
It’s unclear all of the material that was distributed came from the hack or was leaked by somebody else, the report said.
Daniels, with the help of a GoFundMe page, raised enough money to settle the legal debt.
Ross did not respond to the New York Times’ requests for comment.
Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, responded with a vague threat.
“These purported documents were attained as part of an illegal, foreign hacking attack against President Trump and his team,” he said.
“We are working with authorities to determine the legal repercussions for those likely committing federal offenses by posting and utilizing stolen material by terror regime adversaries,” Cheung said.
