Hope Hicks, once a key adviser to Donald Trump, took the stand and described the lengths to which the former president’s inner circle went to keep hush money payments secret – even from her.
Donald Trump’s former long-time confidant Hope Hicks, in her devastating testimony against the former president, on Friday recalled what his embattled 2016 campaign went through, as was evident after ‘Access Hollywood’ tape’s release, and how far he and his inner circle went to link-up hush money payments to avoid any scrutiny from Hicks — even keeping her in the dark
Hicks, previously a press secretary in the White House and senior assistant, now faces the conflict of providing the verbal testimony. She admitted timidly at the start of her testimony that she was “really nervous” and then bursted into tears when Trump’s lawyer began his questioning. The trial had to pause for some time due to the sudden outburst.
Her testimony was a bonanza for the prosecutor who commented on how the defendant expressed shock when hearing the “Access Hollywood” tape that contained Trump saying that he could grab women by the genitals because he was famous and women let him do this.
“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,” she said. “This was a damaging development.”
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The tape, which became public one month before the election – on Oct. 8, 2016 – “was just pulling us backward in a way that was going to be hard to overcome,” she said.
Then, just four days before the election, she fielded a question from a Wall Street Journal reporter looking for a comment on an even bigger story – a story about American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, buying the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story that she had an affair with Trump years earlier. And later, the reporter also wanted to know about Stormy Daniels, the former porn star who claimed to have sexual encounters with Trump.
In each instance, Hicks was given an excuse: In the case of McDougal, David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, told her that the $150,000 payment was a business contract for magazine covers and fitness columns. And Trump told her that the $130,000 payment to Daniels from Cohen was “made out of the kindness of his heart.”
“Mr. Trump was saying he had spoken to Michael and that Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation – and that Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that that’s what he was doing. And he did it out of the kindness of his own heart and he never told anybody about it.”
When asked to describe whether that story seemed to bolster what Hicks knew about Cohen’s character, Hicks said that it was “out of character for Michael.”
“I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person,” she said.
When Hicks was asked about the McDougal and Daniels incident last Friday, she decided to point out one good thing about the way the president reacted to the news. She repeated several times that his concern was not about how the news would hamper his political goals but that it might affect his wife, Melania Trump. The detail also supports the defense’s plan of portraying Trump as a family man, who loves and takes care of his spouse – not a politician muddying the waters about the alleged affair, just to divert the community’s attention away from the upcoming election.
