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Court documents tie Trump, Hicks to 2016 hush money payoff
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Court documents released Thursday
closely tied President Donald Trump and his former top aide Hope Hicks to
hush money paid to a porn actress ahead of the 2016 election.
But a New York judge said the investigation into the payment was closed,
making it likely that neither the president nor anyone but his former lawyer
Michael Cohen will be punished for them.
The FBI warrant requests released Thursday show the law enforcement agency
believed Trump and Hicks were intimately involved in arranging the $130,000
payment to Stormy Daniels — the screen name for Stephanie Clifford.
The documents map out a flurry of phone calls and text messages in October
2016, when Cohen was arranging the payment to Daniels to keep her from going
public with her claim of an affair years earlier with Trump.
The exchanges involved Cohen, Daniels’ attorney Keith Davidson, media
executives David Pecker and Dylan Howard, Trump and Hicks, and came as
Daniels was quietly offering to sell her story about Trump to media just
weeks before a hotly contested election.
Cohen was ultimately convicted and imprisoned on campaign finance and other
violations.
– Numerous calls –
The documents show eight calls, including two involving Trump and three
with Hicks, on October 8, 2016, as Cohen prepared a plan to buy Daniels’
silence at, he has said, Trump’s direction.
The FBI noted that before that day, Cohen had not spoken by phone to Trump
or Hicks — Trump’s campaign press secretary and then his White House
communications director — for several weeks.
It took weeks to finalize the deal, after communications suggested that
Daniels was still preparing to sell her story to Britain’s Daily Mail.
After some panicky communications, on October 26 — two weeks before the
election — Cohen spoke to Trump multiple times. Over the next two days, he
created a shell company to handle the payoff and transferred the funds.
“Based on the timing of the calls… and the content of the text messages
and emails, I believe that at least some of these communications concerned
the need to prevent Clifford from going public,” an FBI investigator wrote.
Trump, who has both denied knowledge of the payment and argued they were
not a crime, was implicated as “Individual-1” in court documents last year in
the Cohen case, raising the possibility that he too could be charged for the
hush money payment.
– Illegal campaign contribution –
The court ruled that the payment to Daniels, which Trump later repaid to
Cohen, amounted to an illegal campaign contribution because it aimed at
helping Trump win the election.
The documents also show Cohen liaising with Trump, Hicks and White House
advisor Kellyanne Conway in early November 2016 over a looming Wall Street
Journal story that the National Enquirer had bought the silence of another
alleged former Trump lover, Karen McDougal.
When the story gained little traction in other media, Hicks and Cohen
enthused in text messages that the efforts to counter it had worked.
Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow on Thursday hailed the closure of the
investigation in a statement to media.
“We have maintained from the outset that the President never engaged in any
campaign finance violation,” he said.
Cohen said in a statement, issued through his publicist, that Sekulow’s
comments were “completely distorted and dishonest.”
“The conclusion of the investigation exonerating The Trump Organization’s
role should be of great concern to the American people and investigated by
Congress and the Department of Justice,” he said.
Adam Schiff, the Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
questioned whether the Department of Justice had ended the investigation in
order to protect Trump.
“The inescapable conclusion from all of the public materials available now
is that there was ample evidence to charge Donald Trump with the same
criminal election law violations for which Michael Cohen pled guilty and is
now serving time in prison,” Schiff said in a statement.
“Were Individual-1 not protected by the DOJ opinion prohibiting the
indictment of a sitting president, he would be criminally charged as Cohen’s
co-conspirator.”
BSS/AFP/GMR/0851 hrs