Still reeling from the fall-out of his 2016 Presidential Election Victory, United States President, Donald. J Trump May not be getting a reprieve anytime soon.
Reports coming out of Washington have revealed that Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen secretly recorded a conversation with Donald Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Donald Trump.
The recording was seized alongside other documents by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) earlier this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office.
The Department of Justice has been investigating the involvement of Mr. Cohen in paying off women who may have embarrassing stories about Donald Trump prior to the 2016 Presidential election.
Prosecutors say they want to know whether such payments violated federal campaign finance laws, and any conversation with Mr. Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them.
The existence of such a recording has raised public interest into the methods Donald Trump employs to keep certain parts of his personal and business life a secret. Its existence also highlights the potential legal and political danger that Mr. Cohen represents to Mr. Trump as prosecutors see his value as the keeper of Donald Trump’s many secrets. Donald Trump recognised this fact when he fired Mr. Cohen as his personal lawyer.
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Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s new personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani confirmed that the conversation did indeed happen, but the payments were never made. He said the recording was less than two minutes and demonstrated that the president had done no wrong.
“Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance. Mr. Trump had directed Mr. Cohen that if he were to make a payment related to the woman, write a check, rather than sending cash, so it could be properly documented. In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence,”
Mr. Cohen’s lawyers discovered the recording as part of their review of the seized materials and shared it with Donald Trump’s lawyers.
Former model, Karen McDougal, alleged that she began a nearly yearlong affair with Donald Trump in 2006, shortly after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron.
She then went ahead to sell her story to The National Enquirer for $150,000 during the final months of the presidential campaign, but the tabloid refused to publish the story.