White House tries to Stormy Daniels focus to Trump lawyer, campaign

Leah Millis | Reuters

Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah holds the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, March 26, 2018.

With the legal battle between adult film star Stormy Daniels and President Donald Trump showing no signs of a quick resolution, the White House on Monday attempted to create some distance between the administration and two key parties in the Daniels controversy: The 2016 Trump campaign and the president’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

“I can speak only for the White House. I can say categorically the White House didn’t engage in any wrongdoing,” said deputy press secretary Raj Shah, when asked if he could categorically state that “the Trump campaign and the Trump administration” had not broken campaign finance laws.

Shah did not defend either the Trump campaign or Cohen. Instead, he told reporters at the daily press briefing that, “anything with respect to their actions” would need to be addressed by either Cohen or the campaign, but not by the White House.

Shah applied the same tactic to questions about the 2016 nondisclosure agreement between Trump and Daniels, which Cohen was party to on behalf of an LLC he later used to pay Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, $130,000 in exchange for her silence.

“You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen about the specifics,” Shah said.

The controversy forced Shah to walk a rhetorical tightrope. He spoke for the president by denying Daniels’ allegations, but he refused to say why the president entered into a confidentiality agreement with Daniels 10 years later to buy her silence for $130,000.

That question, Shah argued, is Cohen’s responsibility to answer. “You can have Michael Cohen address specifics regarding this agreement,” Shah told reporters.

The briefing came the day after CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired a highly anticipated interview with Daniels. The adult film actress claimed in the interview that she had been physically threatened in a parking lot in 2011 by someone who ordered her not to speak about her alleged relationship with Trump.