Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) says no one is buying the story that former President Trump didn’t have a sexual relationship with porn actress Stormy Daniels, quipping to CNN, “You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”
Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels a week and a half before the 2016 election to stay quiet about her alleged relationship with Trump.
Daniels later described to Anderson Cooper and “60 Minutes” having sex with Trump in a hotel suite after meeting him at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006.
Trump later denied having an affair with Daniels, and his legal team threatened to sue her for violating a nondisclosure agreement.
But Romney, a vocal Trump critic who was the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and announced last year that he would not seek reelection to the Senate, told CNN on Tuesday that he believes Daniels’s story.
“I think everybody has made their own assessment of President Trump’s character,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju outside the Capitol. “And so far as I know, you don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.”
The affair and the hush money payment to Daniels is the centerpiece of the case that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) has brought against Trump, charging him with violating New York’s law against falsifying business records.
Jurors heard testimony Tuesday from David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer who said he promised Trump while he was running for president that he would buy potentially harmful stories about the candidate in order to stop them from becoming public.
The Hill has requested comment from Trump’s campaign on Romney’s remarks.
Updated at 9:14 a.m. EDT