Podcaster Joe Rogan compared Donald Trump’s hush money case involving payments to Stormy Daniels to two previous scandals involving formerly centre-stage US politicians during his show this week.
Specifically, he referred to social media posts circulating in which the case is compared with those of President Bill Clinton and former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards — both Democrats.
Said Rogan, regarding former president Trump’s possible indictment: “They’re talking about arresting him for paying a girl to stop talking about them having sex. I thought that was a good deal. I thought it’s a good deal.”
He continued: “You pay someone … Didn’t Clinton do that? Didn’t … John Edwards got in trouble for doing that, but he didn’t go to jail. I don’t believe he went to jail.”
Some supporters of Mr Trump are claiming it is a double-standard that he may be indicted but neither Mr Clinton nor Mr Edwards faced any consequences.
The Associated Press published a fact-check of these and found them to be false.
“Clinton and Trump’s cases have key differences, according to legal experts. Clinton’s $850,000 payment to Paula Jones in 1998 settled a civil lawsuit. The payment was public and legal, and the funds did not come from the government, nor did they amount to a campaign contribution,” the Associated Press explained.
“By comparison, the payment in Trump’s case was through a shell company and reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the reimbursements as legal expenses in the final weeks of his 2016 presidential campaign.”
“There is no comparison between these two payments from a legal point of view,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor specialising in legal and government ethics at Washington University in St Louis. “The 1998 Clinton-Jones settlement was a settlement of a civil lawsuit. And the settlement was public and was filed in court. In contrast, this payment from Trump to Stormy Daniels was secret.”
She added that another difference is that Mr Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pled guilty to violating federal campaign finance laws in connection to the payment. Mr Cohen, now a key prosecution witness, has said Mr Trump was involved as well.
“Trump’s payment was illegal, and later became the basis for a guilty plea and was part of an illegal campaign contribution,” Ms Clark said.
Mr Clinton agreed to pay his accuser, Ms Jones, $850,000 to drop a sexual harassment lawsuit. He settled out of court in November 1998, about halfway through his second term as president. As part of the settlement, he acknowledged no wrongdoing and offered no apology.
Ms Jones alleged that Mr Clinton, as Arkansas governor in 1991, made a crude advance in a room at a Little Rock hotel when she was a clerk for the Arkansas state government. Her lawsuit was later dismissed by a federal judge.
“Both involve payments for alleged sexual misconduct, but from a legal point of view there’s no comparison between the two,” Ms Clark said. “There’s no indication that the 1998 Clinton-Jones settlement was aimed at influencing the election, in addition it was not secret, it was public.”
The case of former Senator Edwards is perhaps more comparable. His 2008 campaign for the presidency was investigated for the illegal use of funds to cover up his affair with former staffer Rielle Hunter with whom he fathered a child.
On 3 June 2011, Mr Edwards was indicted by a federal grand jury in North Carolina on six felony charges, including four counts of collecting illegal campaign contributions, one count of conspiracy, and one count of making false statements.
His trial began on 23 April 2012, and he faced the possibility of up to 30 years in prison and a $1.5m fine.
Mr Edwards was found not guilty on Count three, illegal use of campaign funding, on 31 May 2012, while mistrials were declared on all other counts against him when the jury could not reach an agreement on the verdict.
Two weeks later the Department of Justice announced it was dropping the charges and would not attempt to retry Mr Edwards.
With additional reporting by the Associated Press
