Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director, stated on Friday that there was anxiety surrounding the 2016 presidential campaign of the late President Donald Trump.
According to Hicks, there was concern about the implications of the Stormy Daniels and Trump recording from “Access Hollywood.”
In her testimony at the hush money trial, the former director of communications for the White House informed Manhattan prosecutors that the leak of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape had completely destroyed Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Concerns about possible political repercussions stemming from a recording of the former president boasting about groping women without consent dogged Trump’s 2016 campaign.
According to rumors, the former president gave Stormy Daniels $130,000 through Michael Cohen, his attorney, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Hicks said he was taken aback and huddled up with other Trump advisors when the news of the tape’s existence came on October 7, 2016, roughly a month before the election, via a Washington Post reporter.
Hicks advised the campaign leadership to “deny, deny, deny” in response to the reporter’s request, according to her.
In her testimony, she said, “I had a good feeling that this was going to be a big story and that it was going to take over the news cycle for a few days.”
This was a negative turn of events.
“This was simply pushing us in a direction that would be difficult to reverse.”
She was called to testify by the prosecution in order to support their claims that Trump conspired to obstruct the publication of embarrassing accounts of his personal life in order to improperly influence the 2016 presidential election.
Alvin Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, has worked to demonstrate this connection in an effort to convince the public of the case’s importance as well as to get a conviction in what may be the only one of four Trump prosecutions to get to trial this year.
Hicks informed the jury that Trump maintained his ignorance of Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels in order to keep her from disclosing her alleged sexual encounter with him.
According to her, Trump eventually arrived to the conclusion that it would be wise to keep Daniels’ tale secret, reasoning that “it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”
However, Hicks retorted that everything they discussed at the time was seen through the prism of the campaign when asked if Trump was similarly concerned about the story’s effect on the campaign.
She claimed that in order to determine how well his appearances, speeches, and initiatives were receiving support from the public, Trump would frequently ask her, “How is it playing?”
