As ‘60 Minutes’ Prepares Stormy Daniels Interview, Lawyers Battle
(Mr. Avenatti on Sunday pointed to a clause that said the agreement was “valid and binding” when “signed by all parties.”)
A suit that Mr. Avenatti filed on Tuesday evening in Los Angeles County Superior Court included a nugget of news:
Mr. Trump’s lawyer had initiated “a bogus arbitration proceeding” against Ms. Clifford to “shut her up.”
That appeared to force an error at the White House the next day, when the president’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been avoiding engagement in Ms. Clifford’s story, said
that an arbitration proceeding “was won in the president’s favor.” That led to news that Mr. Cohen had acquired a temporary restraining order against Ms. Clifford in late February.
For instance, on Friday, Mr. Avenatti shared with NBC News and then ABC News
that Mr. Cohen had conducted some negotiations with Ms. Clifford in 2016 on his Trump Organization email account.
With the “60 Minutes” interview and a series of tweets from Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, taunting Mr. Cohen last week, the actress
and her lawyer were pursuing an aggressive strategy to pressure the president.
That, Mr. Avenatti told NBC, was at variance with Mr. Cohen’s previous statement
that neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign were “party to” the agreement with Ms. Clifford.
By JIM RUTENBERG and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUMMARCH 11, 2018
The CBS News program “60 Minutes” was moving forward with plans to show an interview it conducted last week with the pornographic film actress who says she had an affair with Donald J. Trump as her lawyer
and a lawyer for the president traded public jabs through the weekend over her right to speak.