A shocking video
Unlike the witnesses who preceded her, Hope Hicks was part of Donald Trump’s campaign team in 2016, as press secretary. Her testimony was all the more expected as this 35-year-old woman still respects the former president. It served the cause of the prosecution by establishing that the broadcast of the video ofAccess Hollywood, on October 7, 2016, created a shock in the Trump camp. In this video, the presidential candidate boasted of being able to grab women’s genitals. “We all agreed that the recording was harmful and that it was a crisis,” she said. She also recalled that Donald Trump told her in 2018 that Michael Cohen had paid $130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniels to protect him against “false allegations.” According to his testimony, Donald Trump thought “it would have been bad for this story to come out before the election.”
PHOTO TOM BRENNER, REUTERS
Hope Hicks at the exit of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, in 2020
An annoying “fix”
But Hope Hicks’ testimony also provided ammunition for defense attorneys. In particular, he contributed to further darkening the portrait of Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer. Hope Hicks said Michael Cohen had a history of making unauthorized decisions that hurt Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. “He liked to refer to himself as a ‘fixer,’ or ‘Mr. Fix It,’ and only because he broke things first could he then fix them,” she said. She also expressed her skepticism by saying that Donald Trump had told her that Michael Cohen had taken care of the payment to Stormy Daniels “out of the kindness of his heart”. “I didn’t know that Michael was a particularly charitable or selfless person,” she said. Nervous at the start of her testimony, she broke down at the end, shedding a few tears.
ILLUSTRATION JANE ROSENBERG, REUTERS
Courtroom sketch depicting lawyer Keith Davidson
A reinforced thesis
Keith Davidson was also a double-edged witness for the prosecution on Tuesday and Thursday. He described in detail his role in negotiating the agreements that guaranteed the silence of the magazine’s ex-playmate Playboy Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had intimate relations with Donald Trump. His testimony reinforced the prosecution’s theory that these agreements contributed to the election of Donald Trump. Thursday, referring to text messages exchanged with the editor-in-chief of National Enquirer, whose boss, David Pecker, paid $150,000 to Karen McDougal, said: “There was an understanding that our efforts – scratch that – that our activities may have helped Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. » Keith Davidson also mentioned a telephone conversation with Michael Cohen where the latter claimed that Donald Trump told him he regretted having given the green light to the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.
PHOTO YUKI IWAMURA, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Michael Cohen in March 2023
Sulfur avocados
Throughout his testimony, Keith Davidson added damning details about Michael Cohen’s character, as had already been done by the trial’s first witness, David Pecker. To hear him say, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, who was responsible for paying Stormy Daniels, is a vulgar loudmouth who has ideas of grandeur. He notably said that Michael Cohen was furious when he told him that Donald Trump had not entrusted him with an important position in Washington, either chief of staff of the White House or attorney general of the United States. “I thought he was going to kill himself,” Keith Davidson said. The latter did not fare much better when questioned by Emil Bove, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers. It emerged from this hostile interrogation that Keith Davidson himself could pass for a serial extortionist for whom Donald Trump was only a juicier target than the others.
An important recording
The lawsuit has yet to prove that Donald Trump asked Michael Cohen to pay $130,000 to Stormy Daniels. The former president is accused of having falsified commercial documents to camouflage this payment. But the prosecution on Thursday introduced a significant telephone recording between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump. The appeal dates back to September 6, 2016 and concerns the payment of $150,000 made by David Pecker, the CEO of National Enquirer, to Karen McDougal. At the beginning, Cohen mentions the need to create a company to reimburse David Pecker. “Pay cash,” Trump tells him at one point. And Cohen replied: “No, no, no, no, no, I’ll take care of it. » The conversation aims to demonstrate that Donald Trump was at least aware of the payment to McDougal before the presidential election. But what about paying Stormy Daniels? It will largely fall to Michael Cohen, whose credibility has been under attack all week, to answer this question.