Michael Cohen’s texts and recordings on hush money go under the microscope

Hope Hicks said she had worked with Michael Cohen on a statement to send in response to The Wall Street Journal’s forthcoming story about Karen McDougal and the National Enquirer.

Hicks initially wrote things like,“We deny each and every accusation,” but Cohen urged a different approach.

“These accusations are completely untrue and just the latest despicable attempt by the liberal media and the Clinton machine to distract the public from the FBI’s ongoing criminal investigation into Secretary Clinton and her closest associates,” Cohen wrote back to her, according to an exhibit of the email text shown in court.

Hicks recalled talking with Trump, who wanted to understand what David Pecker had told Hicks previously. Trump then had input on the statement that Hicks and Cohen had been drafting, which became a denial of the accusations and said they knew nothing about the deal between McDougal and the Enquirer.

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Hicks, a former Trump aide, just testified about when she learned that the Wall Street Journal was planning to publish a story about Karen McDougal, including details that McDougal had a story that was purchased by the Enquirer about her relationship with Trump that was never published.

Hicks testified that she went to Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, with the story, hoping he could get in touch with executives at the Journal to delay publication.

Hicks was asked if she had heard of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and she recalled that she learned of McDougal on Nov. 4, 2016, after receiving an inquiry from a Wall Street Journal reporter about the former Playboy model and the National Enquirer.

Daniels was mentioned in that same story, she said, adding that she first heard of the adult film actress a year earlier, when “guys on a plane” were discussing her attendance at a celebrity golf tournament with a participant who played with Trump.

Hicks testified that the Wall Street Journal reporter, Michael Rothfeld, asked whether Trump or the campaign knew about McDougal, who had a story alleging that she had an affair with Trump a decade earlier, while he was married to Melania, that was purchased by the National Enquirer but was never published.

Hicks said she thought she told Trump, whom she was traveling with at the time, about the inquiry before he started speaking at a rally in Ohio. She also said she forwarded the email to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to see if he could reach Rupert Murdoch, who owned the newspaper, to buy more time before the story was published.

The trial has taken a lunch break until 2:15 p.m., when Hicks will continue testifying.

Because of a conflict by one of the jurors, the testimony will end at 3:45 p.m. today.

Hope Hicks testified that after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, she said she spoke to Michael Cohen by phone about another rumored Trump tape.

She said she asked Cohen to call a friend of his to ask if there was such a tape, and if so, when could they expect it to be published.

Hope Hicks described some of the political fallout from the “Access Hollywood” tape, including statements from then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling it “repugnant and unacceptable” and from former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney calling it “disgraceful [and] disgusting.”

Hicks was also asked whether Trump was disinvited from an event hosted by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

“I believe we were still going,” Hicks answered, adding, “but there was a programming change and an effort to distance himself from Mr. Trump, so Mr. Trump made a decision to do something else.” 

Hicks said that the news coverage of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape was so intense, it ended up pushing news of a Category 4 hurricane out of the news cycle.

“It was intense, it dominated coverage for, I would say, the 36 hours leading up to the debate,” Hicks recalled.

“We were anticipating a Category 4 hurricane around that time and no one remembers it because it was ‘all Trump’ in the news during that time,” Hicks continued.

Hicks testified that she had a good sense that the “Access Hollywood” tape was going to be a huge story that would dominate the news cycle for at least the next several days.

She said it was a “damaging development” for the campaign, with lots of layers that “complicated where we were trying to go in a way that was going to be hard to overcome.”

“There was consensus among us all that the tape was damaging and that this was going to be a crisis,” she said.

Asked for her reaction when she learned of the “Access Hollywood” tape from the Washington Post reporter, Hicks said she was “very concerned,” adding that she had only the transcript and not the tape itself.

She said she forwarded the reporter’s email to other top campaign officials, including Jason Miller, David Bosse, Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, writing, “Need to hear the tape to be sure, deny, deny, deny.” She said she then went to speak to the group of them on the 25th floor of Trump Tower.

She conceded that her strategy of denying the conversation on the tape proved to be more difficult once the recording came out.

Hicks recalls receiving the email from Washington Post journalist David Fahrenthold, which contained the transcript of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, and going to another floor to speak about it with Jason Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller and maybe Chris Christie.

“Everyone was just absorbing the shock of it,” Hicks testified, saying that she interrupted Trump’s debate prep session to speak with his advisers about it.

When Trump read the transcript, he told Hicks, “That doesn’t sound like something I would say.”

Trump, who had been watching Hicks closely, is now gazing straight ahead as she says she was “stunned” when she heard the tape and attests to her and the campaign’s concerns. 

Hicks calls it “a damaging development” that would push the campaign “backward,” a view she said was shared by the team.

She also testified that Trump thought the development wasn’t something to get upset about.

Hope Hicks said that she knows David Pecker as the publisher of AMI and the editor of the National Enquirer.

“I had been introduced to him at a previous job” at Hiltzik, a public relations firm, she said, adding that she eventually reconnected with him because he was Trump’s friend.

Hicks recalled a phone call between Trump and Pecker shortly after the Enquirer published a story about Ben Carson. She said she overheard the conversation, including Trump congratulating Pecker on “the great reporting.”

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Hicks said she learned about the “Access Hollywood” tape after she received an email from David A. Farenthold, then a reporter at The Washington Post.

She said Farenthold was requesting a comment from Trump’s office on the tape, which she had not known anything about until then.

Hicks testified that when she began working for Trump in 2015 during his first campaign, the media team consisted of only the two of them.

“It was just me and Mr. Trump,” Hicks said, adding there wasn’t anyone better than him at communications and branding.

She said that she ran statements by Trump before sending them to the press.

“We were all just following his lead,” she testified.

She went on to say that later in the general election there was a larger staff that dealt with phone calls and other needs around the office.

Hicks testified that she hasn’t spoken to the former president since the summer or fall of 2022.

She also said that she’s paying for her own lawyer and is appearing due to a subpoena.

Hope Hicks has taken the stand and when asked for her educational background, she said she’s “really nervous.”

Trump is looking directly at her and appears to be closely listening.

Prosecutors have called Hope Hicks, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and in the White House, as their next witness. Before she could be brought into the room, the defense objected to her serving as a witness. The lawyers are now holding a sidebar with the judge.

After the discussion, Merchan said Hicks was coming to the courtroom. She will be the trial’s ninth witness.

In his cross-examination, Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, asked Longstreet if she had reviewed Michael Cohen’s social media as part of her work on Trump’s case.

Longstreet said she had reviewed Cohen’s X account and listened to some of his Mea Culpa podcast. When Blanche asked if she had listened to the entirety of the podcast, Longstreet responded, “absolutely not,” drawing laughter from the courtroom.

Prosecutors are admitting dozens of Trump’s social media posts, including some tweets from 2016 where he alluded to “made up events that never even happened,” and said, “Nobody has more respect for women than me!”

Trump just wrote on a yellow post-it note and handed it to his lawyer, Todd Blanche, as he’s making his argument in court.

This was the first time we’ve seen Trump do this.

Longstreet testified that as part of her work, she has reviewed 5,000 to 10,000 social media posts about the case and saved 1,500 of them.

She added that she checks online sources multiple times a day, including news articles and posts on Instagram, Twitter — now known as X — LinkedIn, Facebook and Truth Social.

She said she takes screenshots of the posts, adds them to a folder and saves them with a few words to identify each one.

Georgia Longstreet is the next witness to take the stand. She is a paralegal in the Manhattan district attorney’s office who worked on Trump’s case for about a year and a half. She said she identified and saved public material about the case, including social media posts and news articles.

Daus, the forensics and tech expert, agreed with the assertion made by one of Trump’s defense lawyers that questioned how reliable Michael Cohen’s phone data is.

Bove, the defense lawyer, asked whether there were intervening events between 2016, when most of the texts and phone calls at issue date to, and 2023, when Daus was reviewing the phone, that would “present questions about the reliability of the evidence.”

“It would seem so,” Daus answered.

Bove tried to drive home that the data was all contingent on Cohen.

“We’re going to have to take Michael Cohen’s word for it, right?” Bove said.

Daus agreed.

Trump lawyer Emil Bove is back to examine Doug Daus of the DA’s office, who has admitted to a four-day gap between Michael Cohen’s delivery of the phones to former DA investigator Jeremy Rosenberg and their arrival in Daus’ unit.

Daus has acknowledged a gap like that is “not ideal” because you cannot confirm that the phone was secured. 

“Do you know what a factory reset is?” Bove asked Daus, who says it is equivalent to wiping the phone clean of all data.

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Trump lawyer Todd Blanche argued Trump’s posts to his social media site, Truth Social, can’t be admitted into evidence because the witness set to testify today does not have enough knowledge of the posts to prove they are Trump’s.

Blanche added that there is content in these posts that are pure hearsay and without a proper foundation.

As court got underway this morning, the judge corrected Trump’s remarks from yesterday afternoon, when the former president said, “I’m not allowed to testify because of an unconstitutional gag order.”

This morning, Judge Merchan reminded Trump, “As the name of the order indicates, it only applies to extrajudicial statements,” not those made in the courtroom.

Trump has long been frustrated by the gag order, which prevents him from speaking about potential witnesses in the case online or outside of the courtroom. Earlier this week, he was fined $9,000 for prior violations of the order and Merchan threatened jail time if Trump were to keep violating the order.

Speaking to cameras in the courthouse hallway for a few minutes, Trump said Judge Merchan is trying to take away his constitutional rights.

He said that he thinks his team will file a lawsuit today challenging the gag order’s constitutionality.

He also railed against DA Alvin Bragg and Merchan, saying they’re both corrupt and a “disgrace to this country” and “this court.”

“It’s a cabal going on, by the way,” said Trump, who added that they’re trying to get Biden re-elected.

As week three of Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial wraps up, NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos joins “TODAY” to weigh in on Keith Davidson’s testimony on negotiating payoffs before the 2016 election.

The former president has departed Trump Tower and is on his way to the courthouse.

Celebrity scandals became a focal point yesterday during a Trump attorney’s cross-examination of Davidson, the lawyer who represented Daniels and McDougal during the “catch and kill” scheme.

Trump lawyer Emil Bove tried to undermine Davidson’s credibility by implying he had associated himself with people who had bad reputations and seemed to suggest that Davidson engaged in extortion for celebrity gossip, a point the witness repeatedly denied.

“What does the word extortion mean to you?” Bove asked Davidson.

“It’s the obtaining of property by threat or fear or force,” Davidson said.

Read the full story here.

As Trump’s trial resumed in New York, the defense tried to discredit the lawyer who arranged payments to two women. The judge is considering more potential contempt of court violations by Trump for his comments about the case. NBC News’ Laura Jarrett reports.

Trump‘s New York criminal trial is set to resume today with testimony from the forensic analyst who inspected data from the phones of Cohen, including text messages and secret recordings.

Daus began his testimony yesterday, revealing he found more than 39,000 contacts on Cohen’s phone, including those for Trump and his wife, Melania Trump; text messages with Trump allies, including former White House communications director Hope Hicks; photos of Cohen in the White House; and some recordings.

One of the recordings was a snippet of a conversation Cohen had with Trump in September 2016 about how they should handle repaying the National Enquirer’s then-publisher, David Pecker, for the $150,000 he spent to buy the silence of McDougal. The former Playboy model has claimed she had a monthslong affair with Trump that began in 2006, an allegation Trump denies.

Read the full story here.

Taking the stand yesterday, an attorney for Daniels fielded questions on a litany of celebrity gossip stories as attorneys for Trump tried to paint him as an extortionist who helped leverage sex tapes into multimillion-dollar payouts.

Davidson, the lawyer who represented Daniels and McDougal — who said they had affairs with Trump and were paid to stay quiet — gave jurors crucial insight into how the payment came about. Trump has denied the claims by McDougal and Daniels.

Davidson, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented clients in settlement agreements against A-list celebrities, explained to jurors how denials he had issued in Daniels’ name were, in his opinion, truthful — as prosecutors tried to press him to admit the obfuscated the truth. 

A denial that Daniels and Trump had a romantic relationship was “technically true,” he said, under a “very, very, very fine reading of it.”

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