Fox News host Shepard Smith on Friday said Michael Cohen’s admission that he was directed by President Trump in 2016 to pay off women over alleged affairs shows the “hush money” was about not sex but the attempts to keep the information from the public eye ahead of the election.
“It’s important, though we know this, to remember and report often that this is not an investigation, a story of, an unfolding drama of, a man’s personal dalliances outside of his job — this is not a story about that,” Smith said on his show Friday.
{mosads}“The issue here is, did the president, in an effort to sway the results of the 2016 election, commit a federal crime when he gave hush money or directed the hush money be given to women who were accusing him of things and might be able to hurt him in the eyes of the public before the public went to vote,” Smith continued.
Smith concluded by saying that “this isn’t about any sex.”
“This is about trying to influence the vote,” he said.
The comments from Smith come just days after Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight federal charges, including five counts of tax evasion and one count of making a false statement to a federally insured bank.
He said that he paid two women, one an adult-film actress and the second a former Playboy model, at Trump’s direction “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”
Smith pointed out that the guilty plea from Cohen, in which he implicated Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, could be very serious for the White House
As part of its probe into Cohen, prosecutors have granted immunity to National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, both of whom reportedly also have knowledge of the payments.