AP is live from a courthouse in New York where Donald Trump’s hush money trial resumes with a key witness returning to the stand.The second week of testimony Donald Trump’s hush money case will wrap up Friday. The prosecution is setting the stage for pivotal testimony from Michael Cohen, the former Trump attorney who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence.
“He explained that Karen McDougal was paid for magazine covers and fitness columns and that it was all very legitimate and that’s what the contract was for,” Hicks testified.On Nov. 4, 2016, four days before the election, Hicks said she received a request for comment from a Wall Street Journal reporter for a forthcoming story about American Media Inc. buying the rights to Karen McDougal’s story that she had an affair with Trump years earlier.
“He had a very good relationship with Rupert Murdoch and I was hoping to see if we could buy a little extra time to deal with this,” she said of Kushner. Hicks said she wanted to be proactive in seeking out the supposed tape because “I did not want anyone to be blindsided.” “It was intense. It dominated coverage, I would say, for the 36 hours leading up to the debate,” Hicks testified, referring to an important debate with Democrat Hillary Clinton that Trump had been preparing for when the news broke.
Asked her first reaction to the tape, Hicks said she was “a little stunned,” adding that “it was definitely concerning.” The transcript of the conversation, which was attached in an email from a Washington Post reporter, was not read aloud in court, but was shown on monitors visible to jurors. Hicks was asked to read portions of the transcript to herself before responding.
“I would say that Mr. Trump was responsible,” she says. “He knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it, and we were all just following his lead.”Before Hicks took the stand, the court saw and heard some of Trump’s response to the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016. “I had no experience and worked at the company, not the campaign, so I didn’t take it very seriously,” she said. “Eventually I started spending so much time on the campaign that I became a member of the campaign and I was the press secretary.”
Judge Merchan ordered Trump to pay the fine after holding him in contempt of court and finding that posts he made online about his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, porn actor Stormy Daniels and the complexion of the jury had violated the gag order.
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