Michael Cohen Secretly Recorded CNN’s Chris Cuomo: WSJ

Michael Cohen, former attorney for President Donald Trump, secretly recorded a conversation with CNN anchor Chris Cuomo earlier this year, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.

Cuomo broadcast another tape made by Cohen on Tuesday evening, one in which Cohen is heard speaking with then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Cohen’s lawyer, Bill Clinton associate Lanny Davis, provided the tape to CNN on Cohen’s behalf. The conversation addressed an alleged payment to a former Playboy model who is alleged to have had an affair with Trump in 2006.

Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot.

The Journal reported Wednesday:

In the nearly two-hour conversation with CNN reporter Chris Cuomo, which the people said appears to have been surreptitiously recorded by Mr. Cohen, the former Trump lawyer discussed at length the payment he arranged in October 2016, a month before the presidential election, to Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels.

…

During the conversation with Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Cohen assured the reporter that he wasn’t running a tape, according to the people familiar with the matter. He told Mr. Cuomo he was placing the phone in his desk drawer and that the conversation was off the record. The phone appeared to record the entire conversation, the people said.

It isn’t clear whether Mr. Cohen makes any indication on the tape that he arranged the payment to Ms. Clifford in order to bolster Mr. Trump’s campaign. If Mr. Cohen did pay Ms. Clifford to help the candidate’s chances of being elected, he and the campaign may have violated campaign-finance law by making an in-kind contribution exceeding the legal limit and by not disclosing the contribution.

It is legal to record a conversation in New York if only one party consents to the recording.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.