The White House on Monday rebuffed claims made by adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in an explosive television interview detailing her alleged affair with President Trump, including her assertion that she was threatened to keep quiet.
White House spokesman Raj Shah dismissed the entirety of Daniels’s story, aired Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“The president strongly, clearly and has consistently denied these underlying claims,” Shah told reporters. “The only person who has been inconsistent is the one making the claims.”
Shah would not say whether the president watched the interview, but noted that clips of it played Monday on cable news programs.
In the interview, Daniels detailed her alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, after he was married to first lady Melania Trump. Among the most notable claims she made was that someone she believed was associated with Trump threatened her in 2011 to keep quiet about the alleged affair.
According to Daniels, a man walked up to her in a Las Vegas parking lot while she was with her infant daughter and told her to “leave Trump alone [and] forget the story.” She said the man also said she had a “beautiful little girl” and “it would be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
That alleged altercation occurred months after Daniels agreed to tell a sister publication of In Touch magazine her story about the alleged affair in exchange for $15,000.
When pressed specifically on the alleged threat, Shah repeated that Trump “doesn’t believe any of her claims are accurate.” He pointed to a statement Daniels released earlier this year denying the affair occurred.
But Daniels told “60 Minutes” she only signed that statement because she feared Trump allies would make her “life hell in many different ways” if she didn’t.
The “60 Minutes” interview breathed new life into Daniels’s story, which has dogged the president for months. It drew 22 million viewers on Sunday night, the program’s highest ratings in a decade.
Trump has denied the allegations made by the adult film actress in the 2011 interview, claims she repeated again during Sunday’s interview.
The president’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted to arranging a $130,000 payment to Daniels before the 2016 election in exchange for her silence, an agreement Daniels and her lawyer believe no longer applies.
The spokesman confirmed that Trump dined over the weekend with Cohen at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and dismissed the payment as a tacit admission of guilt.
“False charges are settled out of court all the time. This is nothing outside the ordinary,” Shah said.
Source: The Hill
