Payment to “Playboy” model
Recorded phone call puts Trump in trouble
May 3, 2024, 11:13 a.m
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How involved was Donald Trump in arranging hush money payments and was anything covered up? A court in New York is dealing with this and other questions. A secretly recorded phone call plays a major role in Thursday’s hearing.
According to media reports, in the hush money trial against former US President Donald Trump, the jury was shown an explosive recording during the trial on Thursday. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is said to have secretly created it in 2016. He and his client at the time are said to have discussed a hush money agreement with the former “Playboy” model Karen McDougal. This is reported by the AP news agency, among others. The recording has been public since 2018, but has now been played in the courtroom for the first time.
According to the AP, jurors heard Cohen talk to Trump about having to start a company to handle a situation involving former National Enquirer editor David Pecker. Pecker had an agreement in 2016 with Trump and Cohen, and essentially with the Trump campaign, to ferret out stories potentially negative for Trump.
In the tape from September 2016, Cohen talks about founding this company, AP further reports. At one point in the recording, Trump asked: “How much is this going to cost?” As a reporter describes it, he should be “150?” asked what would equal $150,000. There was then further discussion about how the sum should be paid, whether in cash or with a check. Then the tape was interrupted.
The AP reporter reports that jurors listened carefully and watched the proceedings through a transcript displayed on monitors in front of them in the jury box. Trump himself looked angry when he listened to this tape. He leaned forward and looked at the monitors in front of him on the defense table.
Cross-examination puts pressure on lawyer
McDougal claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. He denies this. At the time, the entrepreneur was already married to Melania Trump. She finally received the $150,000 from the National Enquirer, whose publisher Pecker bought the exclusive rights in order to ultimately not publish the story and help Trump. According to media reports, the FBI found the Cohen recording during a search of his office in 2018. In August of the same year, the lawyer pleaded guilty to, among other things, illegal campaign financing and tax fraud. At that time, the focus was also on payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and McDougal. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
After the explosive audio recording, Daniels and McDougal’s former attorney, Keith Davidson, was called to the witness stand on Thursday. At the time, he was negotiating the hush money payments with Cohen. Under cross-examination with Trump’s lawyers, he was asked about other arrangements he made to suppress embarrassing information in exchange for money for his clients, according to the AP. For example, it was about the wrestler Hulk Hogan.
Trump’s lawyers suggested, according to the report, that the hush-money agreements reached in the run-up to the 2016 election may have been a form of blackmail. Davidson testified, however, that at no point did they try to use Trump’s involvement in the 2016 election against him in order to get a better deal.
But during cross-examination, Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove played a tape of a conversation between Cohen and Davidson in which Davidson reports that during those negotiations in 2016, pressure was exerted by Stormy Daniels to get the deal done. And from what Davidson said on the tape, she was afraid that Trump would lose the election, that her influence over him would be lost and that her payment would be significantly reduced.