October surprise: Donald Trump tried to pay off Stormy Daniels again

| 9:29 pm EDT October 16, 2024
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Donald Trump’s entire life has been one long scandal and coverup, and many of those scandals have served to either humiliate him or get him criminally indicted. Earlier this year he was criminally convicted on thirty-four felony counts for having tried to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. Now it turns out Trump has been caught also trying to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels during the 2024 election.

In a stunning and bizarre yet somehow not surprising story broken tonight by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Trump’s attorneys reportedly offered to reduce the past legal fees that Stormy Daniels owes Trump if Daniels agreed not to speak about Trump for the remainder of the 2024 election cycle – which Daniels turned down. Daniels has provided Maddow with emails and a recording corroborating all of this, which Maddow showed on air tonight.

It’s not immediately clear what to make of this. It happened after Trump was convicted at trial, so it’s not witness tampering in that sense. But Trump has yet to be sentenced in that trial, and the judge may be able to take this latest insane bombshell into consideration when it comes to sentencing Trump.

I’ll have to leave it to legal experts when it comes to whether or not Trump’s latest attempt at paying off Daniels constitutes a new crime on its own. Trump was charged and convicted last time in part because he tried to hide the payoff to Daniels by cooking his own books. We’ll see.

But the immediate story here is that with three weeks to go in the election, Donald Trump’s Stormy Daniels scandal is now right back in the headlines. The Trump-Daniels saga hasn’t been in the headlines at all of late. For that matter, Trump’s felony conviction in that saga hasn’t been in the headlines either. But now it’ll be a huge story in the home stretch of the election – specifically because he tried to buy her silence again.