Hope Hicks divulges being at center of Trump’s 2016 damage control 

NEW YORK — “This was a crisis.”

That was the consensus of senior Trump campaign aides on October 7, 2016, after they left the Trump Tower conference room where presidential debate preparation sessions were being held at the time. Meetings were to be held on more pressing issues.

A Washington Post reporter had notified the campaign within two hours that the paper was planning to release what became known as the “Access Hollywood” tape, and the scandal has continued to grow since Election Day. It all but ended Trump’s candidacy for his first presidential election, which is just months away.

Hope Hicks, who received the reporter’s email, took the stand Friday at former President Trump’s hush-money trial in New York to discuss her efforts to quell the ensuing unrest and to hush the two women. details of the revelation that hush money was paid to Alleged affair with a businessman.

Hicks, then-press secretary and close ally of President Trump, was instrumental in shaping media coverage, putting her at the center of everything, and her testimony at trial was crucial to the Manhattan district attorney’s case. It became a thing.

Hicks was one of Trump’s first staffers to work for his 2016 campaign and quickly became one of his most trusted advisers. She served in President Trump’s White House on two separate terms, leaving in early 2018, and she eventually joined Fox’s corporate team before returning to the White House as a senior adviser in early 2020.

She previously appeared before a Washington grand jury during Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into whether President Trump knew he lost the 2020 election. Trump was later indicted in Washington, D.C., for trying to remain in power after the 2020 election.

Hicks has not joined Trump’s political team since the end of his first term and has no role in his 2024 campaign, but people familiar with the matter say there is no tension between the two.

Hicks seemed nervous about being on the stand, occasionally sticking her hands in her hair or fiddling with her earrings. Hicks broke down in tears shortly after expressing doubts about the hush-money payment that President Trump gave her several years ago.

But before prosecutors questioned Hicks about hush money, much of her testimony concerned the release of the “Access Hollywood” tapes. The tape was a watershed moment in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, sparking speculation that the business mogul’s political ambitions had stalled.

On the tape, President Trump can be heard bragging about inappropriately grabbing women without their consent, an off-the-cuff remark filmed on the set of a soap opera more than a decade ago. There is.

“I just started kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss them. I won’t even wait,” he says in the tape. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…grab the pooch—. You can do anything.”

“I was worried,” Hicks testified Friday about learning about the tape. “I was very worried.”

The former president is currently facing 34 charges of falsifying business records in connection with paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in fees his then-fixer received to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. has been indicted for. Trump has denied having an affair with her and maintains her innocence.

Although the tape is not central to the case, the district attorney’s office has released a statement stemming from Trump’s statements about the tape as part of an effort to portray the charges against him as a criminal conspiracy to fraudulently influence the 2016 election. They are trying to link the aftermath to the payments to Mr. Daniels.

Hicks probed hush money payments made to Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougall.

Hicks testified that when discussing the payments to McDougal, Trump expressed concern about how his wife, Melania, would react, reinforcing one of Trump’s defenses in the case. He testified that the motive behind the hush money was to avoid embarrassment, not to embarrass Trump’s family. His political fortunes before the election.

But on other occasions, Hicks gave key testimony in the prosecution’s case about election conspiracy. She testified about a conversation she had with President Trump, in which he suggested that former fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels out of good intentions, a characterization that left her with doubts.

Hicks added that just before she broke down in tears on stage, Trump told her it was a good thing that the story of the Daniels payments was making waves after he had already won the 2016 election. .

Prosecutors hope to convince jurors that the hush-money deal was part of a broader criminal conspiracy in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape, with sordid allegations about Mr. Daniels surfacing publicly just before Election Day. It is argued that there has been an increased risk of

Hicks was mentioned earlier in the trial in testimony by former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who said Pecker “caught and killed” salacious stories about the then-presidential candidate. Hicks said he was in the room when he met with Trump to first establish that agreement. This is to ensure that it never appears in the news.

But some of Hicks’ most compelling testimony lies in the damage control she managed in the two hours between when the Post notified the campaign of the existence of the “Access Hollywood” tapes and when the story was published. It was talked about in detail.

Hicks said she forwarded The Post’s request for comment to four senior campaign aides, including Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, and two strategies emerged.

“I need to listen to the tape to make sure it’s accurate,” or “deny, deny, deny.”

“Strategy number two is going to be a little more difficult,” said Hicks, who noticed that the reporter had provided the transcript of the tape.

Hicks then headed upstairs to the Trump Tower conference room, where Trump was holding a debate preparation session against then-rival Hillary Clinton, she said.

Hicks said he motioned for some of his aides to join him outside so as not to disrupt preparations, but they huddled together trying to figure out what to do.

“Everyone was just absorbing the impact,” Hicks testified.

Mr. Hicks said President Trump, who could see them through a conference room window, eventually realized there was a problem and demanded that his aides return to the room to explain the situation.

When faced with a request for comment, Trump told Hicks, “I didn’t think that was the kind of thing he would say,” she testified. But when he saw the tape for the first time, he was upset, she said. He later told her that what she said was “typical of two men chatting.”

After a weekend packed with Republicans scrambling to figure out what to do, including what would happen if President Trump ended his candidacy late in the election cycle, the former reality TV host said that Clinton successfully redirected media attention to efforts to dissuade sexual abuse accusers. Her husband, former President Clinton, was in the VIP section of the debate he was preparing for when the “Access Hollywood” tape was leaked.

Trump defeated Clinton in the general election a month later.

Brett Samuels contributed.