Hicks acknowledged she was “really nervous” after stepping up to the microphone.
FILE - Hope Hicks, former White House Communications Director, arrives to meet with the House Intelligence Committee, at the Capitol in Washington, Feb. 27, 2018. Prosecutors say Hicks spoke with former President Donald Trump by phone during a frenzied effort to keep allegations of his marital infidelity out of the press after the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape leaked weeks before the 2016 election. In the tape, from 2005, Trump boasted about grabbing women without permission.
Hicks served as Trump’s 2016 campaign press secretary and was one of a small number of early campaign staffers who joined his administration. Former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, has yet to take the stand in the hush money trial. But jurors are already hearing Cohen’s words as prosecutors work to directly tie Trump to payments to silence women with damaging claims about him before the 2016 election.
Trump’s defense has worked to poke holes in the credibility of prosecutors’ witnesses, and show that Trump was trying to protect his reputation and family — not his campaign — by keeping the women quiet. The defense also suggested while questioning an attorney who represented two women in hush money negotiations that Trump was, in fact, the victim of extortion.
Prosecutors played the recording after calling to the stand Douglas Daus, a forensic analyst from the Manhattan district attorney’s office who performed analyses on iPhones Cohen turned over to authorities during the investigation. Daus will return to the stand Friday morning, and it’s not clear who will follow him.
“There was an understanding that our efforts may have in some way — strike that — our activities may have in some way assisted the presidential campaign of Donald Trump,” Davidson told jurors.
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