Hope Hicks, who was Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign press secretary and went on to hold various roles in his White House, took the witness stand in his New York criminal case Friday.
Her testimony on the trial's 11th day was the latest in a second week of witness testimony and followed that of forensic analyst Douglas Daus and paralegal Georgia Longstreet.
Lawyer Keith Davidson concluded his testimony Thursday after spending nearly 6 1/2 hours on the stand over two days. He laid out for jurors details of his negotiations with Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer on behalf of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.
Daus also took the stand that day, testifying about what he found on Cohen's cellphone. Among other things, Daus said Cohen had nearly 40,000 contacts saved to the device.
Trump is accused of falsifying internal business records to cover up hush money payments — including $130,000 given to Daniels, a porn actor, by Cohen — recording them instead as legal expenses.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Hicks testified Friday that she asked Jared Kushner to try to delay publication of a story involving Donald Trump and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Hicks said that four days before the November 2016 election, she received a request for comment from a Wall Street Journal reporter for a forthcoming story about American Media Inc. buying the rights to McDougal’s story that she had an affair with Trump years earlier.
Immediately, Hicks testified, she reached out to Kushner — in hopes he could use his connections to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Journal’s parent company, News Corp., to help delay the story.
“He had a very good relationship with Rupert Murdoch and I was hoping to see if we could buy a little extra time to deal with this,” she said of Kushner.
Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, told her that he likely wouldn’t be able to reach Murdoch in time, Hicks testified.
Hicks testified Friday that she first heard Stormy Daniels' name uttered on Donald Trump's plane about a year before Michael Cohen struck a deal with the porn actor to silence her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.
In November 2015, Hicks said, she heard Trump and some of his security detail “telling a story about a celebrity golf tournament and some of the participants in the tournament and her name came up.”
The way the story went, Daniels “was there with one of the other participants that Mr. Trump played with that day,” Hicks testified.
In the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about what she says was an awkward and unexpected sexual encounter with Trump at a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe in July 2006.
Trump denies having sex with Daniels.