Story highlights
The Wall Street Journal reported a Trump attorney used an LLC to pay a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump
Pence dismissed the reports as the "latest baseless allegations" against Trump
Vice President Mike Pence, speaking from Jerusalem on Monday, dismissed reports stemming from an alleged affair between President Donald Trump and a porn star.
Pence told the Associated Press he was “not going to comment on the latest baseless allegations against the President.”
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump attorney Michael Cohen formed a private LLC and, through the LLC, paid Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, $130,000 weeks before the 2016 election so that Clifford would not go public with her story about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
CNN has not independently confirmed The Wall Street Journal’s reporting, and in response to the initial Wall Street Journal report about the affair, Cohen said the rumors had circulated since 2011 and that Trump “once again vehemently denies any such occurrence.”
Cohen also provided a statement he said was from Daniels, where she called the notion she received hush money from Trump “completely false.”
“If indeed I did have a relationship with Donald Trump, trust me, you wouldn’t be reading about in the news, you would be reading about it in my book. But the fact of the matter is, these stories are not true,” Daniels said, according to the statement Cohen provided.
Pence headed to the Middle East on Friday on a scheduled trip, as funding talks collapsed and the government shut down through the weekend. On Monday, he spoke in the Israeli Parliament and declared the US would open its embassy in Jerusalem by the end of 2019.
CNN’s Sophie Tatum contributed to this report.