White House: Trump Reimbursed Michael Cohen $130,000 Without Knowing It Was for Stormy Daniels

A White House spokeswoman said that President Donald Trump did not know as recently as a month ago that he had reimbursed his personal attorney for spending $130,000 to keep a porn star quiet.

Speaking at the daily press briefing Thursday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump “eventually learned” that the money he reimbursed longtime lawyer Michael Cohen for included the payment to Stormy Daniels.

But she said that he did not know about the reimbursement from his own pocketbook when he said on Air Force One on April 5 that he did not know anything about the Daniels hush money. When reporters explicitly asked Trump if he knew about the payment, he responded “no, no.”

“This was information the president didn’t know at the time and eventually learned,” Sanders told reporters.

Read More: A Short History of Trump’s Changing Story on the Stormy Daniels Payoff

In a number of interviews over the last two days, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has said that Trump reimbursed Cohen from his personal bank account as much as $470,000 for the Daniels payment and other “incidental expenses” from the campaign, breaking the payments up into monthly installments of $35,000.

When pressed on whether that conflicts with Trump’s previous denials, Giuliani has also said that Trump did not know what the reimbursements were for at the time he spoke.

“He didn’t know about the payment at the time that it happened,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Which makes his statement literally true.”

Sanders, who has also denied Trump knew anything about the payments, said she found out about the reimbursement by watching Giuliani’s interview on Fox News Thursday night.

 

Write to Alana Abramson at Alana.Abramson@time.com.