New Cohen Docs Renew Questions of How Much Trump Knew About Alleged Hush Payment
The revelation came one day after a Manhattan federal judge ordered prosecutors to release public versions of 2018 applications for search warrants related to an investigation into campaign finance violations by Cohen.
July 18, 2019 at 02:53 PM
4 minute read
The original version of this story was published on New York Law Journal
A newly released search warrant application shows President Donald Trump was in close contact with Michael Cohen as the attorney was arranging a hush money payment to a porn star who was claiming to have had an affair with the then-candidate.
The document, signed by an unidentified FBI agent, details an October 2016 call between Cohen and Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks. At some point, Trump was connected into that call.
The document also lays out a timeline of texts, emails and phone calls between Trump, Hicks, Cohen and an attorney for Stephanie Clifford—who performed as an adult-film actress under the stage name Stormy Daniels—and others, in the wake a video that showed Trump talking to “Access Hollywood”'s Billy Bush and referring to women in vulgar terms.
The documents do not show that the FBI knew whether Trump knew of the payments or directed them, however.
The new details emerged one day after a Manhattan federal judge ordered prosecutors to release public versions of 2018 applications for search warrants related to an investigation into campaign finance violations by Cohen, who began a three-year prison sentence in May for campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.
In an affidavit an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation linked the communications concerning the need to prevent Clifford from going public with allegations that she and Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship years earlier.
The warrants indicated that Trump joined a call between Cohen and Hicks on Oct. 8, 2016, one day after the “Access Hollywood” story broke. At the time, Clifford was in discussions with multiple media outlets to divulge details of her alleged relationship with Trump.
According to the warrants, the call between Trump, Cohen and Hicks lasted for more than four minutes and were followed by a series phone calls that Cohen made to David Pecker and Dylan Howard, who were both top-ranking executives at American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer.
Prior to the Oct. 8 call, Cohen and Hicks had not spoken in “multiple weeks,” and Cohen and Trump had spoken only sporadically in the preceding months. The content of the calls were not revealed in the documents
“Based on the timing of the calls in the days following the 'Access Hollywood' story, and the content of the text messages and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public, particularly in the wake of the 'Access Hollywood' story,” the unidentified agent wrote.
The affidavit said that Trump and Cohen spoke again Oct. 26, shortly before Cohen opened an account he used to transfer $131,000 from his home equity line of credit.
Trump denied having sex with Clifford when she went public with her claims in 2018, but later admitted to reimbursing Cohen for the payment.
In a letter made public Thursday, prosecutors said that they had “effectively concluded” an investigation into hush-money payment and whether anyone in Cohen's orbit had lied or tried to obstruct the probe.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge William Pauley III of the Southern District of New York ordered that the documents be made public, due in part to “the weighty public ramifications of the conduct” they described.
“The campaign finance violations discussed in the materials are a matter of national importance. Now that the government's investigation into those violations has concluded, it is time that every American has an opportunity to scrutinize the materials,” Pauley wrote.
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