Documents reveal Trump’s involvement calls that led to Stormy Daniels payments

Donald Trump, his campaign team, personal lawyer Michael Cohen and others were directly involved in engineering hush-money payments during 2016 election campaign to an adult-film actress who said she had a sexual encounter with the president.

A court filing unsealed on Thursday said Trump and Hope Hicks spoke repeatedly with Cohen, in October 2016 as Daniels – also known as Stephanie Clifford – threatened to sell her story of an affair with Trump.

“I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public,” an FBI agent wrote, in an application for a search warrant.

Cohen later admitted to making payments totalling $280,000 through a shell company to buy the silence of Daniels and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also alleged she had an affair with Trump.

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.

Hicks testified before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year that she was never present for any discussion during the campaign between Trump and Cohen about Daniels.

The new disclosures raise the possibility that Hicks lied to the FBI. Hicks told an agent in an interview that “she did not learn about the allegations made by Clifford until early November 2016”, the new filings said. Hicks, who is now a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, has denied wrongdoing.

The filings were released at the federal court in Manhattan, where Cohen pleaded guilty last year to campaign finance and personal financial crimes. Cohen began a three-year sentence in federal prison in May this year.