Posted by On Friday, Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director, stated that the 2016 Trump presidential campaign was fraught with anxiety.
The ‘Access Hollywood’ video with Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels caused a lot of people to worry, according to Hicks.
According to the former White House communication director, who testified before Manhattan prosecutors in the hush money trial, the release of the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 completely flipped Trump’s presidential campaign.
The possibility for electoral harm from a recording showing the former president boasting about sexually grabbing women without their consent was a major concern for Trump’s 2016 campaign.
It was alleged that in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the ex-president bribed Stormy Daniels with $130,000 via his lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Hicks said that he and other Trump aides huddled together in shock after hearing about the tape’s existence from the Washington Post writer on October 7, 2016, which was around one month before the election.
After receiving the reporter’s request, Hicks advised the campaign’s leadership to “deny, deny, deny,” according to her statement.
Based on my intuition, I knew this was going to be a big deal and the center of attention for the following several days, she said during her testimony.
This was a negative turn of events.
“This was simply setting us back in a direction that would be difficult to recover from.”
She was summoned to the witness stand by the prosecution in order to bolster their case against Trump, who is accused of conspiring to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election by trying to thwart the publication of embarrassing information about his private life.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has been trying to prove that connection in order to convict Trump and convince the public that this case is important—it’s one of four charges against the president that might go to trial this year.
According to Hicks, Trump denied knowing that Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 to silence her about her sexual encounters with Trump.
She added that Trump said, “it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election,” which led him to conclude that it was advisable to conceal Daniels’ allegation.
Hicks said that all of their conversations at the time were filtered through the campaign’s perspective when asked whether Trump was concerned about the story’s effect on the campaign.
She stated that Trump frequently asked her, “How is it playing?” to see how Americans were responding to his speeches, appearances, and proposals.