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.”
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