WASHINGTON_President Donald Trump said Thursday that he did not know that his personal lawyer made a $130,000 payment days before the 2016 presidential election to a pornographic movie actress who had accused Trump of engaging in a consensual affair.
Asked whether he was aware of the payment to Stephanie Clifford, Trump offered a one-word response: "No." He spoke during an Air Force One flight from an event in West Virginia to Washington.
It was not clear from the brief comments when Trump became aware of the payment to Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. He said reporters would have to ask his attorney, Michael Cohen, why Cohen made the payment.
Asked if he knew where the money came from, Trump replied, "No, I don't know."
Cohen, Trump's longtime lawyer, has said that he paid Clifford out of his own money through a shell corporation established just before the payment was made.
Trump did not answer when asked whether he had set up a fund from which Cohen could draw money.
Clifford filed suit in March to gain her release from the nondisclosure agreement she signed when she received the money. Her attorney, Michael Avenatti, has argued that the agreement was voided because Trump did not sign it. He had been listed on the agreement under a pseudonym.
Avenatti immediately seized on Trump's statement Thursday as evidence that no agreement legally existed.
"Good (actually GREAT) things come to those who wait!!! The strength of our case just went up exponentially," he said on Twitter. "You can't have an agreement when one party claims to know nothing about it."
While Trump indicated Thursday that he was unaware of the effort to silence Clifford before the election, he has since become involved in trying to restrain her. Earlier this week, he joined a motion to compel Clifford to undertake arbitration _ a private process _ to come to an agreement.
The company through which Cohen paid Clifford _ Essential Consultants _ was also party to that motion, filed in U.S. District Court in California.
Clifford is one of two women who have gone public recently about past relationships with the president. At the time that Clifford made her deal with Cohen, Trump's campaign had been rocked by accusations by more than a dozen women that he had been sexually aggressive with them. Trump has denied all of the accusations, labeling the women liars.
In a recent interview aired on CBS' "60 Minutes," Clifford said she wanted to break her nondisclosure deal in order "to defend myself."
"I'm not OK with being made out to be a liar, or people thinking that I did this for money," she said.
Clifford's alleged relationship with Trump overlapped with another alleged affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal. McDougal asserted on CNN that she had a 10-month love affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007.
Both affairs allegedly began shortly after Trump and his wife, Melania, welcomed a son, Barron, who is now 12.
Clifford described her relationship with Trump as entwined with her effort to get on his then-hit TV show "The Apprentice," but McDougal described a more intimate relationship, with dozens of sexual encounters with Trump. They enjoyed at least five rendezvous a month in California, New York and New Jersey until, overcome with guilt, she cut it off, she said. During the CNN interview, McDougal apologized to the first lady.
Clifford told "60 Minutes" that she had been threatened in 2011 to keep quiet about her relationship with Trump. She said she did not know the identity of a man she said had approached her when she was with her infant child and implied that harm would come to her if she talked about the future president.
