Face of Nation : Documents released by a judge’s order on Thursday detailed a flurry of communications involving Donald Trump, his campaign team, personal lawyer Michael Cohen and others to engineer hush-money payments shortly before the 2016 election to an adult-film actress who said she had a sexual encounter with the president.
U.S. District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan on Wednesday had ordered that the material, used by prosecutors to obtain a 2018 search warrant for Cohen’s home and office, be unsealed on Thursday morning. The judge found there was no reason to keep the documents secret after prosecutors told him that their investigation into the payments had ended.
Cohen, 52, pleaded guilty in August 2018 to violating campaign finance law by directing payments of $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels and $150,000 to Playboy model Karen McDougal to avert a scandal shortly before the 2016 presidential election. Both women have said they had sexual encounters with Trump more than a decade ago and that the money was meant to buy their silence. Trump has denied the encounters and in 2018 told reporters he knew nothing about a payment to Daniels.
The documents reveal frequent phone calls and text messages involving Cohen, Trump staffers and American Media Inc, the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper, in a bid to prevent Daniels’ account of a relationship with Trump from harming his election chances. Trump took part in some of the calls, the documents showed. One text from Cohen apparently described Trump as “pissed.”
The search warrant application described a phone call on Oct. 8, 2016, about a month before the election, involving Trump, Cohen and Hope Hicks, then the press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign, which prosecutors believed was to discuss paying to squash public reports of an affair between Trump and Daniels.
