Court papers show involvment in
President Trump played a hands-on role in the hectic final days of his 2016 campaign to bury accusations that he had slept with porn star Stormy Daniels a decade earlier, fearing the explosive claims could cost him the election, according to court papers released Thursday.
Unsealed search warrant applications from ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s federal New York case detailed a flurry of calls, texts and emails about paying off Daniels between the soon-to-be president and some of his closest aides and allies, who were simultaneously scrambling to deal with the fallout from the Oct. 7, 2016, release of the infamous “grab ’em by the p—-y” tape.
Bent on bottling up any more damaging information, thenTrump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks called Cohen the morning after the “p—-y” tape dropped and began laying out a frenetic plot to keep Daniels from going public with claims that she had sex with Trump in 2006, one year after he married now-First Lady Melania, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit included in the records.
“Based on the timing of these calls, and the content of the text messages and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent (Daniels) from going public, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story,” the FBI agent wrote, referring to the tape.
Over the following weeks, Trump, Cohen and Hicks worked with David Pecker and Dylan Howard, top executives at the publisher of Trumpboosting tabloid National Enquirer, to hash out a hush agreement giving Daniels $130,000 in exchange for never speaking publicly about her tryst claims, according to the court papers.
The fresh trove of records from the Cohen case pokes massive holes in Trump’s claims last year that he knew nothing about the hush money deal and strongly suggests the president lied repeatedly to the American public about the salacious matter.
Hick’s involvement in the seedy scheme wasn’t previously known either and while it’s been widely speculated that Trump had a hand in arranging the Daniels payoff, the new Cohen papers mark the first official confirmation.