Sunday’s “60 Minutes” featuring an interview with adult film star Stormy Daniels was the most-watched episode of the show in a decade, bringing in more than 21 million views.
But the biggest takeaway for former prosecutor Jonna Spilbor was that Daniels poses no real legal threat to the president.
“There’s nothing that Donald Trump has done that’s been illegal in terms of his dealings with her...This is really [just] an embarrassment, and it’s a way for Stormy Daniels to profit off a consensual encounter,” said Spilbor.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Cliffords, claims she had a consensual affair with the president back in 2006.
In the interview, she said she was threatened into silence in 2011 after she initially sold her story to Bauer Publishing.
“[She] cannot back up any of her claims,” said Spilbor. “If she was truly threatened, she should have gone to the police.”
She also provided the salacious details of their time together, including spanking Trump with a Forbes magazine.
During the 2016 presidential election Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer at the time, paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money and made her sign a non-disclosure agreement.
She’s now suing to invalidate the NDA, since Trump himself never signed on the dotted line.
Daniels interview aired days after CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper caught up with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, who also claims to have had an affair with Trump more than a decade ago.
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/why-former-prosecutor-jonna-spilbor-says-stormy-daniels-doesnt-have-a-case-against-president-trump).
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Nate Boyer, a former NFL player and Green Beret, is the man behind Colin Kaepernick's protests in 2016 when he suggested that the quarterback kneel instead of sit during the National Anthem as a sign of a respect. Two years later, Boyer believes people are missing the point of his protest and not listening to both sides of the issue.
Comedian Erin Gibson said that she believes Louis C.K.'s return to comedy is not welcome and hasn't been earned. Gibson believes retribution is necessary in order to re-enter the comedy space.
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Lance Ulanoff, tech and social media expert, and Ian Sherr, executive editor of CNET News, agreed that Google's decision to not send a top executive to testify to Congress alongside Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey is going to cause significant damage among lawmakers for the company.
Whichever "senior official" wrote the unsigned New York Times op-ed slamming President Trump should come out of the shadows and resign, said Marc Lotter, former press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence.
The New York Times published a scathing Op-Ed written by an unidentified senior official in the Trump administration, setting off a firestorm of speculation about who the insider is. The writer said he and others in the White House were part of “a quiet resistance” to keep the president in check.
John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who first exposed the fraud at blood-testing company Theranos, said the former CEO of the once high-flying start-up had a chance to minimize the pain years ago, but instead used what money the company had to hide the truth.
The activist, diversity consultant, and author is unsure if tech executives like Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey are equipped to fix platforms that they in part helped create and which, at least in the case of Twitter, might be fundamentally broken.
Well, that happened.
Far-right conspiracy theorist and verbal bomb-thrower Alex Jones crashed both the Senate and House hearings on big tech Wednesday, commandeering media attention and at one point nearly getting into an altercation with Sen. Marco Rubio.
Jones told Cheddar's J.D. Durkin that he was there to "face my accusers." Jones, who founded the conspiracy site InfoWars, was booted off Facebook and YouTube for peddling hate speech, though he remains active on Twitter.
