“I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” he says in the tape. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the p—-. You can do anything.”
“I was concerned,” Hicks testified Friday about when she learned of the tape. “I was very concerned.”
Now, the former president is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with reimbursements his then-fixer received after paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. Trump, who denies the affair, pleaded not guilty.
While the tape is not at the center of the case, the district attorney’s office is attempting to connect the fallout from Trump’s remarks on it to the Daniels payment as part of efforts to portray Trump’s charges as a criminal conspiracy to corruptly influence the 2016 election.
Hicks detailed learning of the hush money payments made to Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal.
When discussing the McDougal payment, Hicks testified that Trump expressed concern about how his wife, Melania, would react, bolstering one of Trump’s defenses in the case: that the motivation behind the hush money was to save embarrassment for Trump’s family, rather than to preserve his political fortune before the election.
But at other moments, Hicks gave testimony key to the prosecution’s case of an election conspiracy. She testified about a conversation she had with Trump where he indicated ex-fixer Michael Cohen had made the payment to Daniels out of the goodness of his heart, a characterization she questioned.
Hicks added that Trump told her it was a good thing the Daniels payment story had made waves after he had already won the 2016 election, right before she broke down on the stand.
Prosecutors say the fallout from the “Access Hollywood” tape upped the ante for letting Daniels’s salacious allegations surface publicly just before Election Day, attempting to convince jurors that the hush money deal was part of a broader criminal conspiracy.
Hicks had been brought up earlier in the trial during the testimony of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who said she was in the room when Pecker met Trump to initially establish an agreement to “catch and kill” salacious stories about the then-candidate in order for them to never surface in the news.
But some of Hicks’s most compelling testimony was recounting the damage control she managed during the two hours between when the campaign was notified of the “Access Hollywood” tape by the Post and the story publishing.
Hicks said two strategies emerged as she forwarded the Post’s comment request to four senior campaign aides, including Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon.
“Need to hear the tape to be sure” it’s accurate, or “deny, deny, deny.”
“Strategy number two was going to be a little more difficult,” Hicks said once she realized the reporter had provided a transcript of the tape.
Hicks then headed upstairs to a Trump Tower conference room, she said, where Trump was conducting a debate preparation session for his then-rival, Hillary Clinton.
Hicks said she motioned for a few aides to join her outside so as not to disturb the preparations, and they huddled about what to do.
“Everyone was just absorbing the shock of it,” Hicks testified.
Trump, who could see them through the conference room windows, eventually caught on that there was a problem and demanded his aides come back inside and explain the situation, Hicks said.
When confronted with the comment request, Trump told Hicks that it “didn’t sound like something he would say,” she testified. But the first time he saw the tape, he was upset, she said. He later told her the remarks were “pretty standard stuff for two guys chatting.”
After a weekend filled with Republicans scrambling to figure out what to do, including what would happen if Trump ended his bid that late into the election cycle, the former reality television host managed to reengineer media attention toward his efforts to seat sexual abuse accusers of Clinton’s husband, former President Clinton, in a VIP box at the very debate he was prepping for at the time the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked.
Trump went on to beat Clinton in the general election a month later.
Brett Samuels contributed.
