Here’s one takeaway from the Michael Cohen hearings that probably everyone can agree on — from President Donald Trump to Michael Cohen, and from Rush Limbaugh to Rachel Maddow.
If you’re running for president, and you want to make a hush money payment to a porn star, it’s probably unwise to pay by check.
“The two were very stupid,” said Alex Ozols, a defense attorney in San Diego, referring to Cohen and Trump. “When Trump wrote the check he obviously wasn’t thinking long-term and of the consequences. Cash is essentially untraceable.”
“Obviously, by writing a check for a dubious payment, one is leaving a paper trail,” said Chicago attorney Nancy DePodesta at Saul, Ewing, Arnstein & Lehr. “People pay in cash or services, for this exact reason.” DePodesta, who was a federal prosecutor for 12 years, says checks and other proof of financial transactions were often gold dust for investigators. “We’d follow the money,” she says.
If Cohen and Trump had used cash to pay adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016, the transaction may have never come to light.
Cohen wrote a $135,000 check to Daniels weeks before the 2016 presidential election, so that she wouldn’t speak up publicly about her alleged sexual tryst with Trump. On Wednesday, Cohen presented Congress with checks written to him in 2017 by Trump and associates to reimburse him.
Trump has denied having an affair with Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
Those payments are the only concrete proof connecting Trump, Cohen and Daniels. New York prosecutors are now investigating whether they amounted to campaign-finance violations by candidate Trump. Cohen has now been disbarred in the state of New York — for a variety of offenses — and has been sentenced to jail. He is cooperating with prosecutors against Trump.
Last year, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, unlawful excessive campaign contributions and lying to Congress as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.
Cohen on Wednesday went into details about the convoluted process — including creating a shell company — that he followed in order to keep the payments secret. He allegedly wanted to hide them from Trump’s wife Melania, Cohen’s own wife, and others, Cohen said. He also alleged that there were other hush money payments (and “not all of them had to do with women”).
President Trump tweeted TWTR, -0.50% Wednesday that Cohen was “lying in order to reduce his prison time.”
But with some simple common sense none of this would have been necessary, financial and legal experts agree.
Making legal payments with checks creates a paper trail through the banking system that anyone can follow. (Another recent example: “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett allegedly paid two men with a check to help him stage an attack.) But making payments with cash or certain other alternatives would have left them completely anonymous. That’s one reason that criminals like cryptocurrencies like bitcoin BTCUSD, +0.77%
The main problem with cash, legal and financial experts say, is that the banking system is already set up to track suspiciously large cash withdrawals or deposits. If you withdraw or deposit more than $10,000 at a time, the bank has to report the transaction to federal banking regulators as a suspicious activity.
Even worse, it is actually illegal to withdraw large sums under the $10,000 threshold if you are doing so in order to avoid scrutiny. (Prosecutors used that technicality to jail former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Dennis Hastert; Hastert pleaded guilty in a hush money case related to the sexual abuse of teen boys.)
Aside from cash, experts say gold bullion is the oldest money still in use today.
You can purchase unlimited amounts of gold bullion from established dealers without triggering transaction reports, and the bullion can be used in many circumstances as a substitute for U.S. dollars or other currencies.
Gold was trading at around $1,250 per troy ounce in October, 2016, around the time the Daniels hush-money payment was made. Cohen could have handed her 108 ounces — just under seven pounds — of gold Eagles or Buffaloes. Those are coins issued by the U.S. Mint and readily available from dealers.
Gold, however, leaves a transaction record when it’s bought or sold, Ozols noted.
Cynics reply: That’s an argument for buying it well ahead of time. If Michael Cohen had kept $1 million in gold Eagles in a safe in his office, he could have made hush money payoffs on behalf of Trump as needed and left no money trail at all. He might still be Trump’s attorney. He might not be disbarred or going to jail.
Trump might have learned from the case of TV talk show how and former Cincinnati mayor Jerry Springer, who was caught in a sex scandal in the 1970s when he visited a brothel and also paid by check. In Springer’s case he compounded the error because the check bounced.
Springer said in a commercial in 1982 when he was running for Governor of Ohio: “‘Nine years ago I spent time with a woman I shouldn’t have. And I paid her with a check. I wish I hadn’t done that. And the truth is, I wish no one would ever know. But in the rough world of politics, opponents are not about to let personal embarrassments lay to rest.’’
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