Former Trump adviser tells trial of ‘grab’ comments firestorm
FORMER White House official and Donald Trump adviser Hope Hicks took the stand yesterday at the former president’s hushmoney trial.
She recounted how his 2016 campaign became embroiled in a political firestorm over a recording in which he boasted about grabbing women without their permission.
Hicks, once one of Trump’s closest confidants, was subpoenaed by prosecutors, who are trying to show that the uproar over the infamous leaked Access Hollywood tape hastened Trump’s then-lawyer to pay off a porn actor to bury a negative story that could imperil his 2016 presidential bid.
Hicks’s testimony provided jurors with a glimpse into the chaotic fallout in the Trump campaign over the tape’s release just days before a crucial debate with Democrat rival Hillary Clinton.
Hicks described being stunned and huddling with other Trump advisers after learning about the tape’s existence from a reporter from The
SNP leadership. They have opted for a go-it-alone approach and are not standing on an independence platform but on an anti-Tory one.
“In deserting an independence election strategy they are winding the political clock back some 40 years.”
She added: “Alba Party’s route to independence, as backed by a gathering of the independence movement, is to seek an election mandate at each and every election combined with Ash Regan MSP’s proposal to legislate for a referendum to allow people to extend the powers of the Scottish Parliament to include the independence decision.
“This is the democratic combination which can take Scotland forward and indeed the only independence strategy being presented to the people. “
Washington Post. “I had a good sense to believe this was going to be a massive story and that it was going to dominate the news cycle for the next several days,” Hicks testified. “This was a damaging development.”
She added: “This was just pulling us backwards in a way that was going to be hard to overcome.”
In the aftermath of the tape’s release, she asked Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to chase down a rumour of another potentially damaging tape.
Hicks said she wanted to be proactive in seeking out the supposed tape because she did not want anyone to be “blind-sided.” There ended up not being one.
Four days before the 2016 election, Hicks said she received a request for comment from a Wall Street Journal reporter for a forthcoming story about American Media buying the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story that she had an affair with Trump years earlier.
Trump denies the allegations.