Trump Talked to Michael Cohen as the Lawyer Tried to Bury Affairs, U.S. Says

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump spoke several times by phone with attorney Michael Cohen and campaign press secretary Hope Hicks as Cohen arranged an illegal hush-money payment before the 2016 election, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The documents reflect a previously undisclosed flurry of calls and text messages in October 2016 involving Cohen, Hicks and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway as Cohen scrambled to prevent public disclosures about women claiming affairs with Trump. Both Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic actress known as Stormy Daniels, and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate, had threatened to tell the media that they had affairs with Trump.

Hicks called Cohen on Oct. 8, 2016, and Trump soon joined the call, which lasted four minutes, according to an affidavit by a U.S. attorney’s office investigator. That call came one day after the Washington Post released an “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump boasting of sexually assaulting women.

Trump and Cohen also talked twice on Oct. 26, a day before Cohen wired $130,000 intended to silence Clifford, and again on Oct. 28, according to the documents. In all, they had at least a half-dozen calls in October -- more than over the previous five months combined, the government said.

Although the filings don’t say what was discussed on those calls, it includes the contents of text messages that Cohen sent and received about Clifford and McDougal. Cohen later admitted, in pleading guilty to campaign-finance violations, that he paid Clifford at Trump’s direction.

Descriptions of the calls and texts, released Thursday by a federal judge in New York, were contained in hundreds of pages of affidavits seeking warrants over several months as they closed in on Cohen.

The filings revealed that beyond investigating Cohen, prosecutors probed whether anyone else gave false testimony, lied to investigators or otherwise obstructed justice. Cohen, who is serving three years in prison, was the only person charged.

Several of the newly disclosed calls and texts in October 2016 were between Cohen and Hicks. In the filing, an investigator said he believed some of those concerned Clifford. Hicks told the FBI that she didn’t learn about Clifford’s allegations until early November 2016, according to the affidavit.

For a year and a half after the election, Trump denied any knowledge of hush-money payments to Clifford or that they had an affair. In a series of May 2018 tweets, he acknowledged reimbursing Cohen for $130,000 for a non-disclosure agreement with Clifford to stop her “false and extortionist accusations.”

Beyond outlining Cohen’s efforts to arrange the Clifford payment, the affidavit outlined his many contacts by phone and email with David Pecker, chairman of American Media, which publishes the tabloid National Enquirer, and Dylan Howard, the chief content officer. American Media paid $150,000 to McDougal to bury her story -- a practice known as “catch and kill” -- to save Trump from embarrassment.

Many of the communications outlined in the new filings came as The Wall Street Journal prepared a story revealing American Media’s payment to McDougal.

An hour before the Journal published its story on Nov. 4 -- four days before the election -- Howard texted Cohen, reassuring him the piece wouldn’t be damaging.

Cohen responded: “He’s pissed.”

The investigator who wrote the affidavit said he believed Cohen was referring to Trump.

In the Journal article, Hicks denied knowledge of any agreement with McDougal and said her claim of an affair with Mr. Trump was “totally untrue.” She also said it was “unequivocally” untrue that Clifford had a relationship with Trump.

Prosecutors filed the affidavit on April 7, 2018, two days before they raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel, seizing millions of pages of documents and numerous electronic devices. They asked a judge for permission to track the location of two of Cohen’s cell phones.

The judge ordered the documents to be released after prosecutors told they judge that they had closed their investigation into Cohen’s campaign-finance violations. The filings would be of keen public interest, the judge wrote.

--With assistance from Greg Farrell and Erik Larson.

To contact the reporters on this story: David Voreacos in New York at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net;Shahien Nasiripour in New York at snasiripour1@bloomberg.net;Christian Berthelsen in New York at cberthelsen1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeffrey D Grocott at jgrocott2@bloomberg.net

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.