About the 12-13K that Michael Cohen supposedly paid the hacker.

I wonder how much the hacker reported to the IRS?

He'd have an incentive, if he didn't report the 50K to the IRS, to say he'd gotten much less in his bag -- whether or not that was true. So if someone told the hacker to tell the WSJ that he'd been stiffed, that he only got 12-13K, I can imagine him going along with the plan.

And this plan kills two birds with one stone for Trump. It assigns the known 50K payoff for "tech services" to poll rigging -- relatively innocuous compared to, say, paying off a hacker in Prague. And it allows Trump to tweet, as he did today, that Cohen is a thief who cheated him.