FBI believed Trump was closely involved in hush-money scheme, unsealed documents show
July 18, 2019, 12:20 PM EDT
By Tom Winter and Adam Edelman
The FBI believed then-candidate Donald Trump was closely involved in a scheme to hide hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump, court documents from the closed campaign finance case against former Trump-fixer Michael Cohen show.
The documents, released Thursday, describe a “series of calls, text messages, and emails†among Cohen, Trump, Trump campaign aide Hope Hicks, Keith Davidson — an attorney for Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford — and David Pecker, an executive of the company that published the National Enquirer.
“I have learned that in the days following the Access Hollywood video, Cohen exchanged a series of calls, text messages and emails with Keith Davidson, who was then Clifford’s attorney, David Pecker and Dylan Howard of American Media Inc. (“AMIâ€), the publisher of the National Enquirer, Trump, and Hope Hicks, who was then press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign,†an FBI agent investigating the matter wrote in the released documents.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fbi-believed-trump-was-closely-involved-hush-money-scheme-unsealed-n1031246