Former President Trump’s ex-political adviser Hope Hicks testified for hours Friday in his hush money trial in Manhattan where she detailed the chaos that enveloped his 2016 campaign.
Hicks, once a close confidant of Trump’s including when he ran for office and after he entered the White House, has testified behind closed doors in other investigations involving Trump, but she’s said little publicly of her former boss since he left office after Jan. 6, 2021. She indicated in court that she had not spoken to Trump since 2022.
Follow below for a recap from New York.
Trump briefly addressed reporters gathered outside the courtroom as he exited for the day.
“I was very interested in what took place today,” Trump said, citing the gag order against him to decline weighing in on Hicks’s testimony.
Trump otherwise railed against the case against him and bemoaned that the U.S. was a “nation in decline.”
— Brett Samuels
The court has adjourned, marking the end of the second week of testimony.
— Zach Schonfeld
Judge Juan Merchan ruled for Trump, declining prosecutors’ request to cross-examine him about the gag order violations.
Merchan said it would be “so prejudicial” for the jury to hear that the judge presiding over this very case had found the defendant in criminal contempt.
“It would be very difficult to look past that,” Merchan said.
— Zach Schonfeld
The judge has dismissed the jury for the day, but before adjourning, the parties are returning to a pending legal dispute.
If Trump takes the stand, prosecutors want to cross-examine him about this week’s ruling finding that the former president violated his gag order nine times.
The judge is now hearing arguments.
— Zach Schonfeld
Hicks was excused from the stand after Trump attorney Emil Bove briefly cross-examined her.
Bove got Hicks to confirm that Michael Cohen was not an official part of the campaign but would repeatedly seek to insert himself in various matters.
And before he wrapped, Bove distanced Hicks from the actual charges in Trump’s case.
“While you were focused on your job at the White House, you didn’t have anything to do with the business records of the Trump Organization 200 miles away, right?” Bove asked.
Hicks responded that she did not.
— Zach Schonfeld
Hicks broke down on the stand as she was testifying about a call she had with Trump, in which he told her that Michael Cohen made the payment to Stormy Daniels out of the goodness of his heart. Hicks appeared to have doubts that Cohen did so with that purpose, calling it “out of character.”
Hicks then went on to say that Trump told her it was better that the Daniels story came out after he had already secured his 2016 presidential win.
Among the prosecutors’ allegations is that Trump attempted to hide the payment to Daniels in order to influence the election in his favor.
Hicks has returned to testify after a short break.
When she emerged back in the courtroom and walked up to the stand, Hicks walked slowly and kept her eyes glued to the ground.
“Sorry about that,” Hicks told Trump attorney Emil Bove after the proceedings resumed
“No, it’s OK,” Bove replied.
Bove is now asking Hicks more about her work at Trump’s company before the 2016 campaign.
— Zach Schonfeld
Hicks broke down on the stand just moments into cross-examination from Trump’s attorney, Emil Bove.
Bove had said he wanted to begin with questions about Hicks’s time working for the Trump Organization, when she suddenly broke into tears and grabbed a tissue.
The judge then excused the jury and Hicks for a break.
— Zach Schonfeld
Just after The Wall Street Journal published its story, days before Election Day in 2016, revealing the hush money deal with Karen McDougal, Trump’s then-fixer, Michael Cohen, didn’t think it would get much traction.
“Lots of innuendos with little fact,” Cohen texted Hicks the evening of Nov. 4.
“Poorly written and I [don’t] see it getting much play,” he wrote in a subsequent message.
Hicks, now on the stand at Trump’s trial nearly eight years later, noted there was “just a little irony there.”
— Zach Schonfeld
Judge Juan Merchan has retaken the bench following the lunch break, and Hope Hicks has returned to the stand.
— Zach Schonfeld
Trump took to social media during the lunch break to rage against the trial, complaining that the allegations at the heart of the case have been litigated in the court of public opinion.
“This isn’t a trial, it’s a political campaign, a witch hunt, just like the highly conflicted and biased judge, Juan Merchan, wanted it to be,” Trump wrote in an all capital letters post on Truth Social.
“These eight year old stories, which came out prior to the 2016 election (the voters have already, and loudly, spoken!), and have nothing to do with this fake case, brought by a crooked, Soros backed New York City D.A., Alvin Bragg, should not have been allowed to be used,” Trump continued.
The post was Trump’s first comments since Hicks took the stand.
— Brett Samuels
The court has adjourned for lunch. Hicks’s testimony will continue later this afternoon.
— Zach Schonfeld
Hicks said she sent Cohen a draft of her response to The Wall Street Journal “to get his input” before responding to the paper’s inquiry regarding efforts to keep McDougal’s story quiet.
Cohen replied: “Instead…say: ‘These accusations are completely untrue and just the latest despicable attempt by the liberal media and the Clinton machine to distract the public from the FBI’s ongoing criminal investigation into Secretary Clinton and her closest associates.’”
But Trump did not want that statement, instead suggesting he craft his own, Hicks said.
— Ella Lee
Hicks testified that during Trump’s 2016 campaign, the candidate either wrote every tweet himself or approved them.
Dan Scavino, the campaign’s director of social media, was the one campaign staffer who was allowed to make posts, but he still needed Trump’s approval, Hicks said.
— Zach Schonfeld
Hicks testified that she learned about ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal on Nov. 4, 2016, via a press inquiry from The Wall Street Journal — just four days before the presidential election.
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels’s name came up a “year prior,” in November 2015, as Trump and his security discussed a celebrity golf tournament years earlier.
She learned about both women on one of Trump’s planes en route to a campaign stop, she said.
— Ella Lee