Trump Talked to Michael Cohen as the Lawyer Tried to Bury Affairs, U.S. Says
Trump’s aides frantically worked to contain damaging disclosures about two women who claimed to have had affairs with him.
(Bloomberg) -- In the days after Donald Trump’s campaign was rocked by the disclosure of lewd remarks he made about women on an “Access Hollywood” tape, his aides frantically worked to contain potentially damaging disclosures about two women who claimed to have had affairs with him.
As that plan unfolded in the campaign’s closing days, Trump spoke several times by phone with attorney Michael Cohen, who later admitted to arranging an illegal hush-money payment that he said Trump directed, according to newly unsealed court documents. Cohen also communicated several times during that period with campaign press secretary Hope Hicks.
The documents, released Thursday, reflect a previously undisclosed flurry of October 2016 calls and text messages involving Cohen and Hicks as well as campaign manager Kellyanne Conway amid a scramble to prevent Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic actress known as Stormy Daniels, from going public.
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 release of the “Access Hollywood’’ tape.
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.
The filing offers the strongest evidence to date suggesting Trump’s knowledge of a scheme to silence women to influence the 2016 election. Cohen, who has said Trump directed the hush money to Clifford, is serving a three-year prison term after pleading guilty to campaign-finance violations and other crimes.
The filings revealed that beyond investigating Cohen, prosecutors had probed whether anyone else gave false testimony, lied to investigators or otherwise obstructed justice. But other charges in the matter are unlikely, after prosecutors told a federal judge in Manhattan this week they’ve closed the investigation.
Cohen, who served as Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, has said it’s unjust to allow the president to escape liability for his actions. Democratic lawmakers, too, are asking questions. Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the unsealed documents show Trump was “intimately involved in devising and executing” a corrupt and criminal payment scheme.
Trump can’t be charged with a crime while in office, according to Justice Department policy. Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said he was pleased that the investigation “surrounding these ridiculous campaign finance allegations” is now closed.
Unsealed Documents
The calls and texts were described in an investigator’s affidavit, which was among the hundreds of pages of documents related to Cohen’s case that U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III in New York ordered to be released with the probe’s conclusion. They consisted mainly of search warrants seeking the surveillance of Cohen and his electronic devices before federal authorities raided his home and office in April 2018.
Although the filings don’t say what was discussed on those calls, they cite text messages that Cohen wrote and received in the same period about Clifford as well as Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who also claimed an affair with Trump. The investigator said that the timing of the calls, and the texts’ content, led him to believe that “at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public.”
Several of the October 2016 calls and texts were between Cohen and Hicks. According to the affidavit, Hicks told the FBI that she didn’t learn about Clifford’s allegations until early November 2016. Hicks has testified to lawmakers that her October 8 conversation with Cohen was about a rumored tape purporting to depict Trump with Russian prostitutes in Moscow. She declined to comment.
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.” He said the reimbursement payments to Cohen had “nothing to do with the campaign.”
The potential involvement of Hicks and Conway, however, could have helped prosecutors show that the payments were illegal campaign contributions designed to protect Trump’s candidacy.
Needs to ‘Disappear’
Beyond outlining Cohen’s efforts to arrange the Clifford payment, the affidavit detailed his many contacts by phone and email with David Pecker, chairman of American Media, which publishes the tabloid National Enquirer; Dylan Howard, the chief content officer; and Keith Davidson, the lawyer for Clifford and McDougal. American Media paid $150,000 to McDougal to bury her story -- a practice known as “catch and kill’’ -- to save Trump from embarrassment.
American Media declined to comment, spokesman Jon Hammond said.
After the “Access Hollywood” tape, the affidavit said, Cohen and others struggled over how to silence Clifford. On Oct. 10, Howard texted Davidson and Cohen: “Keith/Michael: Connecting you both in regards to that business opportunity. Spoke to the client this AM and they’re confirmed to proceed.”
In the following days, Cohen took steps to set up payments, tapping his home equity line of credit and moving money into a bank account for a Delaware shell company he had recently formed. The efforts grew more urgent as Davidson suggested to Cohen that Clifford would go public. A story about the affair surfaced on TheSmokingGun.com on Oct. 18.
Talks resumed Oct. 25, with two more calls between Cohen and Trump the next day, according to the affidavit. Clifford got her money on Nov. 1.
But the campaign wasn’t out of the woods. Days ahead of the Nov. 8 election, the Wall Street Journal was preparing a story revealing American Media’s payment to McDougal. Cohen, over several hours on Nov. 4, communicated with Howard, Pecker, Davidson and Hicks about keeping the McDougal story under wraps. “We just need her to disappear,” Howard wrote to Cohen.
That same day, an hour before the Journal published its story on Nov. 4, 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.
‘Boss’ Calling
About a half-hour later, Cohen texted Pecker. “The boss just tried calling you. Are you free?”
The article came out about 20 minutes later.
In it, 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.
In the hours after the article appeared, Hicks and Cohen exchanged messages, as did Cohen and Howard, about the story’s impact.
The next morning, Cohen texted Hicks: “So far I see only 6 stories. Getting little to no traction.”
She responded: “Keep praying!! It’s working!”
All of those exchanges were known to prosecutors by April 9, 2018, when they raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel, seizing millions of pages of documents and numerous electronic devices. The affidavit citing the hush-money payments, dated two days earlier, sought permission to track the location of two of Cohen’s cell phones.
Earlier this week, Judge Pauley ordered the documents to be released after prosecutors told him they had closed their investigation stemming from the campaign-finance violations. He said Americans should have a chance to look at materials he described as a “matter of national importance.”
--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
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