A double standard was at play in the FBI's raid of the office of Donald Trump's lawyer but not Bill Clinton's. A popular meme in March 2019 questioned why Bill Clinton had “paid Paula Jones $850K to go away” yet the FBI hadn’t raided his lawyer’s office.
Lawyers for Donald Trump and NY Attorney General Letitia James faced off in court Wednesday. Trump had hoped a costly contempt-of-court ruling would be lifted permanently. The judge for the AG's probe of Trump's business instead ordered still more affidavits.
Despite the trio’s best efforts to dodge prosecutors’ subpoenas, they’ll be sitting down with the New York attorney general starting July 15.
All in all, events proved the FBI had good reason to raid Cohen’s office, as they gathered evidence of multiple federal crimes (beyond just campaign finance violations) to which Cohen pleaded guilty.
All in all, events proved the FBI had good reason to raid Cohen’s office, as they gathered evidence of multiple federal crimes (beyond just campaign finance violations) to which Cohen pleaded guilty. Bill Clinton’s payment to Paula Jones was a settlement of a civil lawsuit that did not involve any criminal matter or criminal wrongdoing, and thus it was of no legitimate interest to law enforcement. The only commonality between the two cases was that they involved payments by politicians to women, but for very different reasons and circumstances.
On 6 May 1994, Jones , a former Arkansas state employee, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton just days before the statute of limitations would have expired. In her lawsuit, she maintained that on 8 May 1991, she was working the registration desk at Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Third Annual Governor’s Quality Management Conference was being held, an event Bill Clinton (then governor of Arkansas) attended to deliver a speech. Jones alleged that an Arkansas state trooper, Danny Ferguson, approached her at the registration desk, told her that Clinton would like to meet with her, and escorted her to a business suite in the hotel where Clinton was staying.
On 5 April 2018, Trump denied to reporters that he knew about the payment to Daniels. When pressed about why the payment had been made, Trump replied, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen” and asserted he didn’t know where the $130,000 had come from. Four days later, acting on a warrant from federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District obtained in part on a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office, FBI agents seized a variety of material from Cohen’s New York City office, home, and hotel room, including documents related to Cohen’s payment to Daniels and to Karen McDougal, another woman who had alleged an affair with Trump.
Whether Trump himself could be charged with engaging in a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws for his involvement in the hush money payments is still a matter of legal debate, but the issue took a dramatic turn in February 2019 when Cohen revealed before Congress that he was paid reimbursement for the hush money directly from Trump’s personal bank account after Trump became president.
A double standard was at play in the FBI's raid of the office of Donald Trump's lawyer but not Bill Clinton's.
Nothing Clinton did in settling Jones’ civil lawsuit was illegal (or even potentially illegal), but Trump’s payment of hush money to Daniels through his lawyer was possibly an illegal act on the part of Trump and/or Cohen, hence the raid on the latter’s office but not the office of Clinton’s lawyer.