President Donald Trump acknowledged that he has repaid his lawyer Michael Cohen for expenses Cohen occurred during the 2016 presidential election, according to hisfinancial disclosure formsreleased Wednesday.
While not stating explicitly what the payments were for, Trump's lawyers have previously said that Trump reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels.
"In 2016, expenses were incurred by one of the Donald J. Trump's attorneys, Michael Cohen," reads the form, which was released by the Office of Government Ethics. "Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and Mr. Trump fully reimbursed Mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of value would be $100,001-$250,000 and the interest rate would be zero."
Trump submitted the form on Tuesday, the deadline for administration employees to file their financial documents. The agency reviewed the form and made it public on Wednesday.
Trump's representatives insisted in the document that revealing the payments made to Cohen was not necessary by law, instead saying they were listing them "in the interest of transparency."
The ethics office seemed to disagree, annotating the document: "OGE has concluded that the information related to the payment made by Mr. Cohen is required to be reported and that the information provided meets the disclosure requirement for a reportable liability."
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.