Trump, Cohen Maintained Regular Contact While Hush Payments Were Arranged
Newly public documents describe conversations between Cohen and President Trump concerning payments to two women
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Donald Trump and his onetime lawyer Michael Cohen were in particularly close contact while Mr. Cohen was working to arrange a hush-payment scheme before the 2016 presidential election, according to newly public documents that provide the most detailed account to date of discussions among members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle in the final weeks of the campaign.
The documents describe in detail the sequence of conversations Mr. Cohen had with Mr. Trump, National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard, American Media Inc. Chief Executive David Pecker and campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks as he was working to arrange payments to two women who alleged affairs with Mr. Trump, including Stephanie Clifford, a former adult-film actress known professionally as Stormy Daniels. Mr. Trump has denied having the affairs.
“Based on the timing of these 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, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story,” a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent wrote in an April 2018 affidavit made public Thursday, referring to a tape that was released in October 2016 showing Mr. Trump making lewd comments about women about a decade earlier.
The documents provide the most detailed look yet inside the 18-month investigation that led to the implication of a sitting president in federal crimes and sent Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s lawyer for more than a decade, to prison for three years. While prosecutors said in a December court filing that Mr. Cohen arranged the hush payments at Mr. Trump’s direction, they hadn’t previously made public details of the two men’s communications during that period.
They also revealed panicked efforts to respond to a Wall Street Journal article published days before the 2016 election that made public payments from American Media, the National Enquirer’s publisher, to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model and one of the women who alleged an affair with Mr. Trump.
Hours before the article published, Mr. Cohen wrote to Mr. Howard, “He’s pissed,” which the affidavit said was a reference to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Cohen was in unusually frequent contact with Mr. Trump as he was working on arranging the payments, routinely calling him minutes after speaking with Mr. Pecker or Mr. Howard about them, according to the agent’s affidavit. When it appeared a deal to buy the silence of Ms. Clifford was going to fall through, Mr. Cohen’s first call after speaking to Ms. Clifford’s lawyer was to Mr. Trump.
On the morning of Oct. 26, 2016, a day before sending $130,000 to Ms. Clifford, Mr. Cohen called Mr. Trump twice. Less than 30 minutes later, Mr. Cohen sent emails to the person who had incorporated the limited-liability companies through which he planned to wire the payment, asking for filing receipts.
On Oct. 28, 2016, after Mr. Cohen had finalized the transaction with Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Mr. Cohen spoke to Mr. Trump for five minutes.
The frequency of calls between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump that month was a marked increase over previous months in 2016, the affidavit said. The pair spoke once a month from May through July, didn’t speak in August and spoke twice in September. In October, they spoke at least five times in three weeks, and Mr. Cohen tried to call his boss on at least another two occasions.
Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing and has offered varying accounts of whether he was aware of the payments Mr. Cohen arranged during the 2016 election. In November 2018, the Journal published an article documenting Mr. Trump’s extensive involvement in the hush-payment scheme.
Democratic lawmakers on Thursday called for Mr. Trump to face charges for his involvement in the hush-payment scheme. Justice Department policy bars charging a sitting president.
“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,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday.
...The committee’s chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.), in a letter to Ms. Hicks’s attorney on Thursday evening, asked Ms. Hicks to clarify her testimony by Aug. 15.
A spokesman for American Media declined to comment. Lawyers for Mr. Howard and Ms. Hicks didn’t respond to requests for comment.
When the Journal contacted the Trump campaign for comment for the November 2016 article about American Media’s payment to Ms. McDougal, Mr. Cohen had several conversations with Ms. Hicks, Mr. Pecker and Mr. Howard and sought to have Ms. McDougal put out a statement. “We just need her to disappear,” Mr. Howard wrote in a text message to Mr. Cohen, the documents show.
“I think it’ll be ok pal. I think it’ll fade into the distance,” Mr. Howard wrote again to Mr. Cohen of the Journal article, hours before it published.
Mr. Cohen also sent a text to Mr. Pecker: “The boss just tried calling you. Are you free?”
The morning after the Journal article published, Mr. Cohen sent a text to Ms. Hicks saying that the article was “getting little to no traction.” Ms. Hicks responded: “Same. Keep praying!! It’s working!”
Mr. Pecker spoke with Mr. Trump later that morning, according to the affidavit.
U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III ordered the previously redacted materials to be made public Wednesday, after the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office advised the court that it had concluded the aspects of its campaign-finance investigation that justified redacting those materials. In a July 15 letter to Judge Pauley, prosecutors said they had also concluded its investigation into whether “certain individuals ... made false statements, gave false testimony or otherwise obstructed justice in connection with this investigation.”
The Journal previously reported that prosecutors were examining discrepancies between Mr. Cohen’s account and that of Allen Weisselberg, Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer who testified before a grand jury last summer.
Prosecutors had sought to include certain redactions in Thursday’s materials to protect the privacy of third parties in the investigation, but were rebuffed by Judge Pauley, who said the campaign-finance violations had “weighty public ramifications” and were a “matter of national importance.”
Several of the people mentioned in the documents spoke to investigators, including Ms. Hicks, Mr. Howard and Mr. Pecker, who was granted immunity for his testimony.
According to the affidavit, the FBI justified its April 2018 raid of Mr. Cohen’s home, office and hotel room in part by saying they believed that the search would turn up evidence of communications between Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump and Trump campaign associates about the hush payments.
Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in August 2018 to two campaign-finance violations connected to the hush-money payments to Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal. Mr. Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion as well as making false statements to banks and to Congress, and began a three-year prison sentence in May.
In the months since his guilty plea, Manhattan federal prosecutors had continued to probe the possible involvement of others at the Trump Organization in Mr. Cohen’s campaign-finance violations. They haven’t disclosed any indictments of any executives at the company.
“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,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement from prison Thursday.
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