Cohen secretly recorded Trump discussing payment
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.
The FBI seized the recording this year during a raid on Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Trump before the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign-finance laws, and any conversation with Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them.
The recording’s existence appears to undercut the Trump campaign’s denial of any knowledge of payments to the model. And it further draws Trump into questions about tactics he and his associates used to keep aspects of his personal and business life a secret. It also highlights the potential legal and political danger that Cohen represents to Trump.
Once the keeper of many of Trump’s secrets, Cohen is now seen as increasingly willing to consider cooperating with prosecutors.
The former model, Karen McDougal, says she began a nearly yearlong affair with Trump in 2006, shortly after Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. McDougal sold her story for $150,000 to the National Enquirer, which was supportive of Trump, during the final months of the presidential campaign, but the tabloid sat on the story, which kept it from becoming public.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, confirmed Friday that Trump had discussed payments to McDougal with Cohen in person on the recording. He said it was for less than two minutes and Trump did not know he was being recorded. Giuliani said the president had done nothing wrong, contending there was no indication on the tape that Trump knew McDougal Trump
before the conversation about the payment from the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., to McDougal.
Giuliani initially indicated the men discussed a payment from Trump to McDougal — separate from the Enquirer’s payment — to buy her story. Later, he said Trump and Cohen had actually discussed buying the rights to McDougal’s story from the Enquirer.
That payment was never made, Giuliani said, adding that Trump had told Cohen that if he were to make a payment related to McDougal, to write a check rather than send cash, so it could be properly documented.
Neither of Giuliani’s descriptions of the conversations explains why, when The Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of the AMI payment days before the election, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said, “We have no knowledge of any of this.” She said McDougal’s claim of an affair was “totally untrue.”
Cohen’s lawyers discovered the recording as part of their review of the seized materials and shared it with Trump’s lawyers, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Cohen rejected repeated requests for comment. Trump ignored shouted questions about it from reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday afternoon.
David J. Pecker, the chairman of AMI, is a friend of Trump’s, and McDougal has accused Cohen of secretly taking part in the deal — an allegation that is now part of the FBI investigation.
Because the tape showed Trump learning about the AMI payment, it actually helps Trump, Giuliani argued. “In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence,” he said. A person close to Cohen disputed that claim but would not elaborate.
The recording is potential evidence in the campaignfinance investigation but became tied up in a legal fight over what materials are protected by attorney-client privilege and thus off limits to prosecutors. It is not clear whether a federal judge has ruled on whether prosecutors can listen to the recording.
For a decade, Cohen served as one of Trump’s most-trusted fixers. He frequently taped conversations, unbeknown to the people with whom he was speaking, which is legal in New York.
The wide-ranging search warrants served on Cohen this spring show that prosecutors are investigating Cohen’s involvement in payments to silence women about their relationships with Trump. In addition to McDougal’s arrangement, prosecutors also sought evidence of payments to adult film star Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels.
Trump has denied knowing about those payments, though people familiar with the arrangement have said he was aware of them.
Meanwhile, on a separate legal front, The Washington Post reported Friday that investigators in special counsel Robert Mueller’s office have notified an attorney for Kristin Davis, who gained notoriety in the 2000s for running a highend prostitution ring, that they intend to question her as part of their probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, Davis said Friday.
Davis, who is known as the “Manhattan Madam,” said she expects to be asked about her close friend, Roger Stone, a political operative and longtime confidant of Trump. It comes one week after prosecutors unveiled an indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers who allegedly conspired to hack Democrats during the campaign.
Stone was not named in the indictment, but messages cited by prosecutors match communications that he says he had with the Twitter persona Guccifer 2.0, who had claimed online to be a Romanian hacker. Prosecutors say Guccifer was actually a Twitter account operated by Russian military officers. Cohen