You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

FBI Has Tape of Trump Discussing Paying Off Model over Affair

HeadlineJul 23, 2018

Back in the United States, the FBI has obtained a recording in which Donald Trump discussed how to suppress the story of Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who alleges she had a year-long extramarital affair with Trump. In the tape, made before the 2016 election, Trump reportedly discussed with his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen whether to buy the exclusive rights to the story of Karen McDougal, who alleges she had an affair with Trump dating back to 2006. At the time, McDougal had sold her story for $150,000 to the National Enquirer, a tabloid published by Trump’s close friend David Pecker. The paper ultimately kept the rights to the story and refused to publish it, in a process known as “catch and kill.” The tape will now be available to prosecutors in any future criminal investigation of Michael Cohen, after Trump’s legal team reportedly waived attorney-client privilege on the recording. On Sunday, the lawyer for another woman Trump allegedly had an affair with—adult film star Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels—predicted more recordings of Trump’s conversations with Michael Cohen will emerge. This is Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti, speaking on ABC’s “This Week.”

Michael Avenatti: “This is not the only tape, I can tell you that for a fact. There’s multiple tapes.”

George Stephanopoulos: “You don’t know that there are more tapes of President Trump, though.”

Michael Avenatti: “No, I do know there’s more tapes of President Trump. There’s multiple tapes of President Trump, number one. All right, so that’s first of all. And that ultimately is going to prove to be a big problem for the president. You know, that old adage, 'You live by the sword, you die by the sword,' is going to be true in this case, because the president knew that his attorney, Michael Cohen, had a predisposition towards taping conversations with people.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top