Urging Stormy Daniels to abandon fields and castles
By 
Field Commander Cohen decided after the Access Hollywood tape that his fixee should buy off Stormy Daniels:
Michael Cohen initially balked at the idea of buying the silence of a former adult-film star who says she had sex with Donald Trump, but he did an about-face after a video of Mr. Trump talking about groping women became public in October 2016.
A day after the recording surfaced of outtakes of Mr. Trump speaking to a host of NBC’s “Access Hollywood,” Mr. Cohen, then Mr. Trump’s senior counsel, told a representative for the performer that he was open to a deal, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Within days, Stormy Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, signed a nondisclosure agreement that provided her $130,000 for her silence. Mr. Cohen had resisted paying Ms. Clifford when it was floated in September 2016, the person said.
Federal prosecutors in New York view the “Access Hollywood” tape as a trigger that spurred Mr. Cohen to bury potentially damaging information about his boss, as they investigate whether the payment amounted to an illegal, in-kind contribution or an expenditure that should have been disclosed by the campaign, people familiar with the matter said.
From the perspective of campaign finance law, this would be…not good for Trump:
The Journal reports federal prosecutors view the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape as the “trigger” for Cohen’s payments to Daniels.
That’s a big deal. Two important Republican election lawyers have attempted to set a high bar for how to tell when a payment in this context might be campaign-related rather than personal. Charlie Spies told the Journal in February that the payment to Daniels was “an expense that would exist irrespective of whether Mr. Trump was a candidate and therefore should not be treated as a campaign contribution.” And former Federal Election Commission chair Brad Smith wrote in an April op-ed in the Journal that “FEC regulations explain that the campaign cannot pay expenses that would exist ‘irrespective’ of the campaign, even if it might help win election. At the same time, obligations that would not exist ‘but for’ the campaign must be paid from campaign funds.”
Even under these tough standards for what counts as campaign-related, the proof of the timing would be damning for Cohen. Why should Cohen not care a whit about protecting Trump’s reputation in his wife’s eyes in September 2016, but be anxious to close the deal—and shut Daniels up—right as the campaign faced a crisis involving allegations of Trump’s treatment of women? The Daniels payment was not an expense that existed until the campaign needed it. But for the campaign, it seems that Cohen would not have paid.
And yet, probably a good investment, as an October dominated by coverage of Trump’s sex scandals might have played out quite differently than an October dominated by Hillary Clinton’s EMAILS!