Hope Hicks Expected to Tell a Jury Everything She Knows About Trump’s Hush Money Deal: Report

When the Manhattan district attorney goes to trial against Donald Trump later this month, former “fixer” Michael Cohen and adult film star Stormy Daniels are expected to play key roles in potentially convincing a jury to render the ex-president a convicted felon. But of course, other familiar faces may also appear on the stand. Also expected to show up and relay to a jury what she knows about Trump’s infamous hush money deals? Former Trump adviser Hope Hicks.

After meeting with prosecutors last year as they built their case against the presumptive GOP nominee, Hicks will now appear in the courtroom as a witness for the DA’s office, according to The New York Times. Hicks could provide crucial testimony, given that she was serving as Trump’s 2016 campaign press secretary at the time of the $130,000 payment to Daniels, a transaction the government alleges the then candidate covered up by falsifying business records. (Trump has both denied wrongdoing and Daniels’s claim that they had an affair.) In 2019, an attorney for Hicks insisted that their client had had no idea about the hush money deal until it came out in the press. But as NBC News noted Monday, an FBI agent has said otherwise:

An FBI agent who’d been investigating Cohen said in an affidavit for Cohen’s federal criminal case that he believed Hicks was involved in the negotiations aimed at preventing Daniels from going public with her claim that she’d had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied sleeping with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The affidavit noted that the negotiations began in earnest after Trump’s campaign was reeling from the release of the Access Hollywood tape on October 7, 2016. In that video from 2005, Trump could be heard saying in a hot-mic moment that he can grope women without their consent because “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
“I have learned that in the days following the Access Hollywood video, Cohen exchanged a series of calls, text messages, and emails with Keith Davidson, who was then Clifford’s attorney, David Pecker and Dylan Howard of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, Trump, and Hope Hicks, who was then press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign,” the FBI agent wrote in the affidavit.

According to NBC News, court records show that Hicks called Cohen at 7:20 p.m. on October 8, 2016, which was the first time she’d spoken to him by phone in weeks. Trump is said to have joined that call seconds later, and the conversation lasted a total of four minutes. After Trump left the call, Hicks and Cohen spoke privately, after which, court records show, Cohen called Pecker, then the president of American Media. Shortly thereafter, Cohen called Trump and the two men spoke for eight minutes. The records also reveal that Cohen and Trump spoke twice on October 26, i.e, the day Cohen wired $130,000 to an escrow account, which would subsequently be transferred to Daniels’s lawyer.

“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,” the FBI agent said in his affidavit. After the Democratic chair of the House Judiciary Committee noted the “apparent inconsistencies” in Hicks’s claim re: not knowing about the payment at the time it occurred, her lawyer said in a statement, “Reports claiming that Ms. Hicks was involved in conversations about ‘hush money’ payments on October 8, 2016, or knew that payments were being discussed, are simply wrong.”

Should Hicks appear on the stand and potentially incriminate Trump, it wouldn’t be the first time her sworn testimony painted him in an unflattering light. In 2022, she told the January 6 committee that not only was Trump warned of the violence expected to unfold before the attack on the Capitol, but that she and another adviser had urged him to speak out against it, and he refused.

In other Trump legal news, the ex-president avoided having his assets seized this week by the New York attorney general after posting a $175 million bond. Trump was also slapped with an expanded gag order by the judge overseeing the hush money trial, after he spent numerous days publicly attacking the judge’s daughter.