TRUMP: [In background] Good. Let me know what’s happening, okay? Oh, oh. Maybe because of this it would be better if you didn’t go, you know? Maybe because of this. For that one, you know -- I think what you should do is get rid of this. Because it’s so false what they’re saying, it’s such bulls---. Um. [PAUSE] I think, I think this goes away quickly. I think what — I think it’s probably better to do the Charleston thing, just this time. Uh, yeah. In two weeks, it’s fine. I think right now it’s, it’s better. You know? Okay, hun. You take care of yourself. Thanks, [Unintelligible]. Yup, I’m proud of you. So long. Bye.<doc-sep>“The notion that Mr. Cohen would have spoken to Mr. Weisselberg about a proposition he had yet to even make to the president does not ring true,” he said. “Mr. Weisselberg is a bookkeeper who simply carries out directions from others about monetary payments and transfers. There would be no reason for Mr. Cohen to have any conversation with Mr. Weisselberg prior to him recommending and obtaining approval for the purchase he was suggesting.”<doc-sep>A secretly recorded tape of Donald Trump talking to Michael Cohen, released to CNN Tuesday night, is the most momentous revelation yet from the falling-out between the president and his former lawyer. In the September 2016 tape, Cohen alludes to a hush money deal involving former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump a decade earlier. The National Enquirer’s parent company had reached a deal to purchase McDougal’s story. The company, American Media Inc., is run by a friend of Trump, and bought the story specifically so they could prevent it from getting out. So Cohen suggests creating a shell company to pay AMI, and Trump seems to approve. Cohen says he’s already spoken to the CFO of the Trump Organization about financing the deal. Then, as Trump and Cohen discuss the financing, the recording cuts off. (Trump’s team has denied the deal ended up happening.) The tape — recorded by Cohen without Trump’s knowledge — was seized by the FBI during raids on Cohen’s residence and office in April as part of a larger investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The full scope of the investigation is not yet clear, and no one has yet been charged. But it appears to relate to several efforts by Trump’s allies to hush up scandals that could damage him during the campaign — sometimes by paying large sums of money, potentially in violation of campaign finance law. The tape connects Trump to Cohen’s actions directly. Cohen has appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy since the raids, and his team has repeatedly floated the prospect that he might strike a plea deal with prosecutors and “flip” on Trump. No such deal has yet materialized, but it was Cohen’s own attorney Lanny Davis who provided the tape to CNN and who suggested Cohen would no longer defend Trump, adding that there’s “more to come.” But the tape is plenty dramatic on its own — and plenty revealing about how Trump and Cohen operated. It confirms that Trump was well aware of Cohen’s involvement in the McDougal payoff. And since the two men use vague shorthand to describe it, Trump was likely very much in the loop on Cohen’s other legally questionable activities on his behalf as well. The ultimate legal implications, though, remain unclear. What’s the background to what we hear on the Trump-Cohen tape? Michael Cohen is a longtime lawyer and employee of Trump who’s called himself Trump’s “fix-it guy” — “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” he’s said. This role included trying to suppress scandalous stories that could damage Trump during the presidential campaign. By the time the tape was recorded, Cohen was already infamous for making profane, violent-sounding threats to reporters and others. An important ally in this effort was American Media Inc. — the parent company of the National Enquirer, the famed supermarket tabloid, as well as other gossip outlets. The company’s chair, David Pecker, was a longtime personal friend of Trump. Trump himself was a frequent source for Enquirer stories, and the magazine would in return cover him positively — as it did, while savaging his opponents, during the 2016 campaign. But that’s not all AMI did for Trump. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow has reported that the company was known to sometimes use a tabloid industry practice called “catch and kill” for major celebrity scandal stories. It would pay for exclusive rights to a source’s story about a scandal, and deliberately never publish it — as either part of a favor-trading relationship or an effort to gain leverage over the celebrity. And in November 2015, AMI did that for Trump: The company paid a former Trump Tower doorman $30,000 for exclusive rights to his story that Trump had fathered a child with one of his employees, and never ran it. Enter Karen McDougal. McDougal has said she had an affair with Trump from about June 2006 to April 2007, which began when they met at a party at the Playboy mansion (she was a Playboy model) and included multiple other encounters. As Trump’s presidential campaign heated up in 2016, McDougal tried to see if she could make some money from her decade-old experience. A contact in the adult film industry put McDougal in touch with Keith Davidson (the same lawyer who later represented Stormy Daniels for a similar transaction). Davidson then opened discussions with AMI, the National Enquirer’s parent company. Eventually, on August 6, 2016, McDougal signed a contract to sell the exclusive rights to her story about her affair with Trump to AMI, in exchange for $150,000 and the promise of numerous columns and two cover features at AMI magazines. (AMI then, of course, didn’t run the affair story.) During this process, it turns out that Davidson and AMI were in contact with Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Davidson, in fact, promptly informed Cohen when the deal was completed — raising some questions about who he was really working for. And on the September 2016 tape, Cohen discussed the matter with Trump. So what’s actually on the Trump-Cohen tape? Full audio: Presidential candidate Trump is heard on tape discussing with his attorney Michael Cohen how they would buy the rights to a Playboy model's story about an alleged affair Trump had with her years earlier, according to the audio recording "https://t.co/YmC0QuDqTx pic.twitter.com/fBbq7r1Lq9 — Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) July 25, 2018 The two-minute tape (for which the Washington Post made an annotated transcript) begins when we hear Trump’s side of a phone conversation with an unknown person (who some think is Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi). After Trump hangs up, he and Cohen briefly chat about several topics: A “great poll” that just came out A controversy around Mark Burns, a black pastor who supported Trump (initially there’s some confusion about whether Trump means Pastor Darrell Scott, another black pastor who supported Trump) A lawsuit from the New York Times to try to get Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce papers unsealed. “They should never be able to get that,” Trump says. “You have a woman that doesn’t want them unsealed. Who you’ve been handling.” “Yes,” Cohen answers. (The papers reportedly include some very nasty allegations, but ultimately, they weren’t unsealed.) Cohen then says, “Told you about Charleston.” (Trump had just mentioned “the Charleston thing” on the phone. It’s not clear what this is, though it could be just a campaign event.) Then the most important, and legally problematic, part of the exchange begins. COHEN: Um, I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken — “Our friend David” is David Pecker, who chairs AMI and oversees the National Enquirer. “The transfer of all of that info” refers to Karen McDougal’s affair story, which AMI bought the rights to. Cohen wants to set up a new company to, it seems, send money to AMI. TRUMP: Give it to me and get me a [UNINTELLIGIBLE]. COHEN: And, I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with… Allen Weisselberg is the CFO of the Trump Organization, which implies that Trump’s company was involved in Cohen’s hush money efforts. TRUMP: So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty? AMI paid McDougal $150,000 for her story, a fact Trump appears to remember without prompting. Here Trump seems to be discussing paying AMI back for it. COHEN: … Funding ... Yes. Um, and it’s all the stuff. TRUMP: Yeah, I was thinking about that. COHEN: All the stuff. Because — here, you never know where that company — you never know what he’s — TRUMP: Maybe he gets hit by a truck. COHEN: Correct. Here Cohen alludes to buying “all the stuff” from AMI — which appears to mean that the company has other negative stories about Trump that it’s bought and buried, which Cohen wants to buy the rights to.<doc-sep>
Finally, the tape has become public. And it revealed the statements by Ms. Hicks and Mr. Giuliani to be false. The recording, which was broadcast by CNN late Tuesday night, shows Mr. Trump was directly involved in talks about whether to pay The Enquirer for the rights to the woman’s story. The recording, and the repeated statements it contradicts, is a stark example of how Mr. Trump and his aides have used falsehoods as a shield against tough questions and unflattering coverage. Building upon his repeated cry of “fake news,” he told supporters this week not to believe the news. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” the president added. In a capital where politicians have made an art form of the nondenial denial, press secretaries typically reserve their on-the-record denials for reports that are outright false. Candidates can weather most embarrassing stories, and spokespeople know that getting caught in a lie only makes things worse. It was a lie about an affair, after all, that led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment — though his most fateful move was testifying falsely under oath — just as it was a lie about infidelity that ended the political career of John Edwards, once a rising Democratic star (a story that broke in The Enquirer, coincidentally). But Mr. Trump, both as a candidate and as president, has turned that thinking on its head. When faced with the evidence of its misstatements, the administration sidesteps and moves on. “I’m not going to get into a back-and-forth,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said last month when confronted with her unequivocal, and false, denials that Mr. Trump had dictated his son’s misleading statement about meeting with Russians.