Former White House communications director Hope Hicks is expected to be a witness for the prosecution when the falsifying business records case against Donald Trump goes to trial in New York this month, a source with direct knowledge of the situation told NBC News on Monday.
Hicks met for several hours last year with the Manhattan prosecutors who brought the case. They allege that the former president falsified records relating to a hush money payment his then-lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign.
At that time, Hicks was Trump’s campaign press secretary. Her possible testimony at the criminal trial, which is scheduled to begin April 15, was first reported by The New York Times.
An attorney for Hicks said in 2019 that she’d been unaware of the hush money payment until it became public.
But 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 Oct. 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.”
Read the full story at NBC News.
