In the new issue of the magazine, I’ve written a profile of Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Gottlieb has a quality rare in Washington these days—he’s a Trump appointee who even liberals find hard to hate. Here’s an excerpt:
The White House struggled Thursday to square the admission from Rudy Giuliani that President Trump had reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen for his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels with months of denials from Cohen and Trump himself.
President Trump tweeted Thursday morning that Cohen had paid Daniels out of a “monthly retainer” of Trump’s own money and that “money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll [sic] in this transaction.” Just last month, Trump told reporters that he had not known about the payment and did not know where Cohen had gotten the money to make it.
At the Thursday press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stonewalled repeated questions about the contradiction, repeatedly referring reporters back to Guiliani’s comments. “As Mayor Giuliani stated, this wasn’t something that was initially known but later learned,” Sanders said of Trump’s knowledge of the payment. “And again, we give the best information possible at the time.”
“He started paying back Michael Cohen back in February of last year,” a reporter pressed. “How could he not have known? He was paying him back.” Sanders replied that she was “not going to get into those details.”
One More Thing—Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitted Thursday that she herself did not know about Trump’s reimbursement payments to Cohen until Giuliani disclosed it on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Wednesday night. If that’s true—and it tracks with what the Washington Post has reported about how no one in the White House even knew the Giuliani’s revelation was coming—it’s an incredible example of how Trump puts his aides in difficult and untenable positions.
Sanders has faced questions about the payments since January, when the Wall Street Journal first reported on the nondisclosure agreement Daniels signed in the days before the 2016 election. In exchange for her silence on an alleged affair she had with Trump, the porn actress received the $130,000 from Cohen.
Photo of the Day
NBC News reports that federal prosecutors have been monitoring Michael Cohen’s phones stretching back to before the FBI raid on his home and office in early April. From NBC:
NBC initially reported incorrectly that the feds had placed a wiretap on Cohen’s phones, but corrected their story after it was challenged by officials.
Sarah Sanders declined to answer whether Trump, who has raged publicly that the raid on Cohen’s office was “unthinkable,” was concerned that his Justice Department had authorized the monitor. “I’m not sure of the comments on that report, or the claims in that report. That’s something that you would have to talk with the Department of Justice and the president’s outside counsel,” Sanders said. “I haven’t talked to him about that.”
Pruitt Watch—Elaina Plott at the Atlantic reports: “A press staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency attempted to distract from his boss’s troubles by planting stories that would reflect poorly on the secretary of the interior.”
Song of the Day—“Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods
