President Donald Trump wants piece of Stormy Daniels’ settlement over Columbus strip club arrest

President Donald Trump wants a piece of the $450,000 settlement adult film star Stormy Daniels reached with the city of Columbus over her arrest at a strip club in 2018.

Trump, through Columbus attorney Dan Binau, filed a notice that a federal judge in California ordered Daniels to pay more than $293,000 in attorneys’ fees and sanctions for a defamation lawsuit she filed against the president. The judge later dismissed the lawsuit.

Court filings indicate the president wants to recoup some or all of what the California judge awarded him as part of the money Daniels receives from Ohio’s capital city.

Binau filed the notice Wednesday on the docket of the lawsuit Daniels filed against Columbus. He filed a similar notice last month in federal court in southern Ohio.

Daniels’ attorney Chase Mallory said Trump and his lawyer are trying to collect even though the judge in California has not reduced the attorneys’ fees order to a judgment.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, reached her six-figure settlement with Columbus in September. It pertains to her arrest by undercover vice detectives at the strip club Sirens.

Columbus police initially said her July 2018 arrest was part of an investigation into human trafficking and prostitution. Daniels said that was false, and was instead a way to cover a political motivation.

Police later said Daniels put her hands on an officer’s buttocks and put her breasts in an officer’s face, which formed the basis for her arrest.

Columbus’ city attorney later dropped the misdemeanor charges against Daniels and two others arrested the same night. An investigation conducted by the police department’s internal affairs unit did not sustain an allegation of political motivation by the officers involved, but investigators found the arrest was improper.

Daniels gained notoriety after saying she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, prior to his becoming president. She also disclosed a payment she said she received to keep quiet in the months leading up to the 2016 election.

The California lawsuit for which the president now seeks to obtain attorneys’ fees pertains to an April 2018 tweet in which the president questioned statements Daniels made about a man she said threatened her and her daughter in 2011. Daniels said she was considering talking to a magazine about the affair at the time.

Daniels released a sketch of the man she said threatened her, and the next day Trump tweeted that the man was “nonexistent” and Daniels’ assertions were “a total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”

A judge in California ruled that the president’s tweet constituted “rhetorical hyperbole” and tossed Daniels’ case. He issued the order for attorney’s fees and $1,000 in sanctions in December 2018.

Mallory noted that Daniels is appealing the California federal judge’s decision to dismiss the case. He said the notice Trump’s lawyer filed in the Columbus case, which lacked a judgment, was “further evidence that the president and his lawyers don’t even know basic civil procedural law.”

Binau did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Trump is not the only high-profile person in Daniels’ orbit seeking some or all of the settlement. Her former lawyer Michael Avenatti filed a lien that said Daniels owes him more than $2 million for fees and expenses for when he represented her.