Did Hope Hicks Help Sink Trump?

Her testimony was riveting, and her tears were telling.

When former Trump Campaign press secretary Hope Hicks took the stand, the air was thick with anticipation. After all, here was a witness who had no ax to grind with her old boss, who by all accounts was sympathetic to him, but whose testimony could confirm the story that other witnesses like Michael Cohen would be telling the jury.

Hicks was there in the room when stories broke around the Hollywood Access “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” tape and Trump’s longtime affair with Karen McDougal. This all happened in the weeks and days before the 2016 election. Hicks’s role, in her own words, was to “deny, deny, deny” the stories, hoping they wouldn’t gain traction and would fail to move the needle in the final stretch of the campaign.

She was also there in the room, speaking with Donald Trump, when the Stormy Daniels story threatened to come out in 2018. The Wall Street Journal reported that a Trump attorney (Cohen) had paid $130,000 in hush money to another woman, and that there was a non-disclosure agreement involved.

Legal observers were fairly sure what Hicks would say about the stories that broke around the time of the 2016 election. After all, Hicks had already testified to Congress under oath. In New York, she repeated her testimony that the first time she’d heard of Karen McDougal was when the press came to her with questions about it. In other words, Hicks apparently was not involved in the early catch-and-kill conspiracy among David Pecker of the National Enquirer, Donald Trump the candidate and Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen.

What was less certain was what Hicks would say about what she learned later while she worked inside the White House. Hicks was a close confidant of Trump. Did he tell her the truth about what happened, or did he lie to her as well? Whatever information she had, she had already gone before the New York grand jury with it, and what she testified to then was juicy enough for prosecutors to want to put her on the witness stand at trial.

Which brings us to last Friday, when she testified for the prosecution against Donald Trump. You may have seen the headlines about her breaking down in tears after the state’s presentation was done and upon the first question on cross-examination. That emotional moment was highly telling, according to those who observed it in the room, and I’ll get to that below.

First, though, I want to talk about why some legal experts believe Hicks’s testimony was highly damaging to Trump. On this, there are at least two big things to keep in mind: Trump’s true motivation to bury the story about Stormy Daniels, and his awareness of Cohen’s actions to pay her off for her silence.

Hicks testified that Trump’s motivation was to get elected

There’s a key question the jury will need to resolve around Trump’s intent. Did Trump have others pay off Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels because he was afraid Melania would find out, or did he do it because he was afraid the U.S. voters would punish him for it? Or was it some combination of the two?

This matters because it isn’t illegal to have someone else pay off your mistress or your one-night stand so that your wife and family don’t hear about it. But if someone else pays them off so that your campaign doesn’t suffer from the scandal, that person has to report that payoff as a contribution to your election. If the amount exceeds the contribution limits, it becomes an illegal contribution.

Michael Cohen went to jail for this very thing. And pro tip: if you conspired with that person to make the payment happen, you’ve committed a crime as well. The odd thing here is that, for many reasons including the inability to indict a sitting president, Trump was never charged federally for the same crime as Michael Cohen.

If Trump had mixed motives—part personal and part electoral—it doesn’t mean he’s off the hook. If his campaign benefited from it, it still falls under federal election law. And as I discussed last week, if Trump conspired with Cohen and Pecker to violate federal election law by to covering up the payoffs, that’s also a violation of New York state election law.

So why did Trump order the payoffs? We know the common sense answer, but it’s always tricky to prove beyond a reasonable doubt exactly what was going on inside a defendant’s head. But if someone else was there watching it all go down, that helps a lot. It helps even more if that someone was being told things by the defendant in real time.

That’s where Hope Hicks comes in.

Hicks’s testimony made clear that the Trump Campaign was in crisis mode over the Hollywood Access tape. That damning recording, if you recall, had Trump boasting about grabbing women by the genitals and being able to get away with it because he was a celebrity. Trump and the rest of the campaign were well aware that another breaking scandal could cement Trump in voters’ minds as a no-good, womanizing cheater, on top of his “locker room” talk about how to sexually assault women and never be held accountable. (Yes, it’s baffling that many voters didn’t already know and believe this, but that’s where things stood at the time.)

But it probably wouldn’t be enough just for Hicks to talk only about what was going on in 2016. After all, she also testified that Trump was worried how Melania would react, which cuts against the prosecution’s argument.

It was what Trump revealed to her in 2018, when the Stormy Daniels story was starting to go wide, that riveted the jury and likely caused Hicks to lose her composure minutes later. After the story got out, she said Trump admitted to her in a moment of candor that, as far as Stormy Daniels was concerned, “it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.” (Emphasis mine.)

That’s pretty good evidence of Trump’s intent. Look for prosecutors to come back to this statement during closing arguments to support their argument that Trump had Cohen pay Daniels off to help win the 2016 election, not just to keep it from Melania.

Hicks testified that Trump was aware of the payoff

A key line of defense for the Trump will be that he was not involved in the scheme to pay off Daniels. After all, neither his signature nor that even of his pseudonym “David Dennison” appears on the actual agreement. Who’s to say whether Trump even knew what his fixer Cohen was up to? Cohen will say one thing, but he’s a liar and a convicted felon, the defense will remind the jury. They will argue Cohen had a chip on his shoulder for not being picked to follow Trump to D.C. and is out to ruin Trump.

Once again, enter Hope Hicks.

She testified that Trump told her that “Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation, and that Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that’s what he was doing and he did it out of the kindness of his heart.”

Not even Hicks bought this narrative. When asked what she thought about Trump’s statement, she testified, “I’d say that would be out of character for Michael… I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person.” She said instead that Cohen was “the kind of person who seeks credit.”

So sure, Trump lied to her. But zooming out a bit, this statement about what Cohen did actually proves something quite important in the timeline. It shows that, in 2018, Trump already knew what Cohen had done. After this statement, the paper trail shows that Trump continued to sign checks to Cohen, allegedly for “legal fees” but really to reimburse Cohen for the payoff. As legal analyst Andrew Weissman wrote about those checks Trump made out to Cohen,

[Hicks’s] testimony makes plain Trump did so knowing that they were not payments for legal fees. And for that reason, the jury need not decide whether Trump knew of the scheme at the time (as Hicks strongly intimated) or only learned of it later (as he claimed to Hicks), since in either scenario, Trump knew of the scheme prior to making the reimbursements.

In other words, either way Trump is rather screwed. Now he can’t claim he never knew about the payoff, because by at least 2018 he admitted it to Hicks. After that point, anything he did to help cover it up was illegal.

Note that Trump is also on record admitting in a separate civil suit, brought by Daniels, that he reimbursed Cohen for the payment he made to Stormy Daniels. A California court acknowledged that fact in a ruling on the question of whether Trump was a party to the non-disclosure agreement. So that will likely come into evidence later, and it will be pretty damning.

Bottom line, the prosecution is building a case around facts that have clear receipts, whether it’s Donald Trump’s own admission to a different court or his 2018 lie to Hope Hicks, which happens also to prove his full knowledge of what Cohen did.

Hicks’s tears

Many people have been critical of the media focusing so much on Hope Hicks’s tears, which sometimes have suggested that people somehow should feel bad for her. I take a different view, focusing on what it says about her lack of bias.

Hicks’s emotional breakdown tends to show that she knew she was betraying Trump with her testimony but had no real alternative. The fact that she was still a big fan of his, even praising him during her time on the stand, shows that she actually had no motivation whatsoever to lie about what he had said to her or to throw him under the bus. She had decided, however, to break publicly with Trump, and the two haven’t spoken in a couple of years. Hicks delivered her direct testimony with her eyes squarely upon the prosecutor the whole time, not looking at the man who had plucked her out of obscurity and given her one of the biggest platforms in the world.

If I were in the jury, those tears would confirm to me that she knew she had just sunk him, and she was overcome with the enormity of it. She was also probably hoping that the MAGA world would not truly understand what she just did, but much of the legal world definitely does.