‘What do we got to pay for this?’ Trump jury hears recording of key call
NEW YORK — Jurors in the hushmoney trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to buy the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former U.S. president.
A visibly irritated Trump leaned forward at the defence table and jurors appeared riveted as prosecutors played the September 2016 recording that lawyer Michael Cohen secretly made of himself briefing his celebrity client on a plan to buy Karen McDougal’s story of an extramarital relationship.
Although the recording surfaced years ago, it is perhaps the most colourful piece of evidence presented to jurors so far to connect Trump to the hush money payments at the centre of his criminal trial in Manhattan.
It followed hours of testimony from a lawyer who negotiated the deal for McDougal’s silence and admitted to being stunned that his hidden-hand efforts might have contributed to Trump’s White House victory.
“What have we done?” lawyer Keith Davidson texted the theneditor of the National Enquirer, which had buried stories of sexual encounters to prevent them surfacing in the final days of the bitterly contested presidential race. “Oh my God,” came the response from Dylan Howard.
“There was an understanding that our efforts may have in some way — strike that — our activities may have in some way assisted the presidential campaign of Donald Trump,” Davidson told jurors, though he acknowledged under crossexamination that he dealt directly with Cohen and never Trump.
The testimony from Davidson was designed to directly connect the hush-money payments to Trump’s presidential ambitions and to bolster the prosecution’s argument that the case is about interference in the 2016 election rather than simply sex and money.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has sought to establish that link not just to secure a conviction but also to persuade the public of the significance of the case, which might be the only one of four Trump prosecutions to reach trial this year.
“This is sort of gallows humour. It was on election night as the results were coming in,” Davidson said.
Davidson is seen as a vital building block for the prosecution’s case that Trump and his allies schemed to bury unflattering stories in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
He represented both McDougal and porn actor Stormy Daniels in negotiations that resulted in the purchase of rights to their claims of sexual encounters with Trump and those stories getting squelched, a tabloid industry practice known as “catch-and-kill.”
Davidson is one of several key players testifying in advance of Cohen, the star prosecution witness who paid Daniels $130,000 US for her silence and also recorded himself, weeks before the election, telling Trump about a plan to buy McDougal’s story so that it would never come out.
At one point in the recording, Cohen revealed that he had spoken to then-Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg about “how to set the whole thing up with funding.” To which Trump can be heard responding: “What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?”
Trump can be heard suggesting that the payment be made with cash, prompting Cohen to object by saying “no” four times. Trump can then be heard saying “check” before the recording cuts off.
The line of questioning from Trump lawyer Emil Bove appeared intended to cast Trump as removed from the negotiations and to suggest that Cohen was handling the hush-money matters on his own.
Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied relationships with either woman, as well as any wrongdoing in the case.
Before the start of testimony, prosecutors requested $1,000 fines for each of four comments by Trump that they say violated a judge’s gag order barring him from attacking witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case.
Such a penalty would be on top of a $9,000 fine that Judge Juan M. Merchan imposed on Tuesday related to nine separate violations that he found.
Merchan did not immediately rule on the request for fresh sanctions.