Insiders thought Access Hollywood tape would be beginning of the end for Trump, trial hears

While Donald Trump’s campaign was spiralling after a leaked tape caught him bragging about sexually assaulting women, an attorney and tabloid editor brokering deals to keep damaging stories about him out of the press thought his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election were over, his hush money trial heard on Tuesday.

Keith Davidson – a former attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels who ultimately negotiated the $130,000 sale of her story to Mr Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen – testified that interest in his client’s story “reached a crescendo” after the 2005 Access Hollywood tape leaked just weeks before Election Day in 2016.

That deal is at the heart of the hush money case against the former president, who is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in an alleged effort to cover up his reimbursements to Cohen as “legal expenses.”

Mr Davidson spent the morning testifying about a separate scheme involving a different client, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, whose story of an alleged affair with Mr Trump was buried by the publisher of the National Enquirer for $150,000.

Then the Access Hollywood tape happened.

Manhattan prosecutors have built their case on the story of a candidate who was desperate to keep his election chances afloat while his campaign was in “damage control mode” after the tape’s release.

Mr Davidson discussed the tape with then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard, who fed potentially damaging allegations about Mr Trump to his publisher David Pecker as part of a secret “catch and kill” scheme to purchase the rights to those stories without any intention of publishing them.

“Trump is f*****,” Mr Davidson wrote to Mr Howard, according to messages shown in court on Tuesday.

“Wave the white flag. It’s over people!” Mr Howard replied.

Prior allegations about Ms Daniels were already on a gossip website, but in the wake of the Access Hollywood scandal, “it could get a lot worse” if she resurrected them, Mr Davidson testified.

That tape captured Mr Trump saying that he “moved” on a female TV personality “like a b****”.

He can be heard saying on the tape: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.”

Ms Daniels’s manager “went directly” to Mr Howard to negotiate a deal for her story, according to Mr Davidson. “I had nothing to do with that,” he said.

Last week, Mr Pecker testified that he wanted nothing to do with the story, fearing that any connections between American Media Inc and an adult film star could threaten his distribution at major retailers like Walmart.

“Dylan was washing his hands of the deal,” Mr Davidson told the court on Tuesday.

“This story involved [Cohen’s] client and that was his interest in the story,” he said. “In essence, Michael Cohen stepped into AMI’s shoes.”

But in the weeks that followed, Mr Davidson endured “frustrating” negotiations with Mr Trump’s one-time “fixer,” whose erratic and excuses-filled discussions forced him out of representing his client, he said on Tuesday.

He repeatedly sent Cohen copies of a settlement agreement and bank wiring instructions that were met with a “barrage of excuses,” according to Mr Davidson.

Cohen told him that the Trump Organization’s “computer systems were ‘all f***** up’” and that Secret Service and “so many god damn firewalls” tied him up from the deal, Mr Davidson said.

“I think you can tell by these emails that I was sending him there was a great level of frustration by me and my clients – my client – and I let him know that the level of dissatisfaction was quite high,” Mr Davidson said. “And he stated, ‘God dammit, I’ll just do it myself.’”

By 17 October 2016, several days after the deadline to wire funds to Ms Daniels, Mr Davidson emailed Cohen to let him know that the agreement was void and that he would not longer be representing Ms Daniels.

“I didn’t want to receive a million frustrated phone calls from Michael Cohen,” Mr Davidson said. “This is where I said, ‘Hey, this deal is over,’ and I said to both Cohen and my client, ‘I’m out.’”

Asked what he believed was really happening behind the scenes, Mr Davidson said: “I thought he was trying to kick the can down the road until after the election.”

Meanwhile, Cohen was urgently directing his banker Gary Farro to establish a shell corporation to funnel his own money from a home equity line of credit into an account that would wire Mr Davidson the cash for his client.

On 26 October 2016, Cohen sent Mr Davidson a confirmation email from Mr Farro’s assistant that the money was deposited into Cohen’s account.

“It meant nothing to me,” Mr Davidson said, “because he had my wiring instructions. All he had to do was wire funds. But he didn’t wire funds. He sent me an email that he had the money, not that he sent the money to me.”

At the time, Cohen was a “highly excitable, pants-on-fire kind of guy,” according to Mr Davidson, who compared Cohen to “the dog from Up.”

He assumed that the money for Ms Daniels, however, was coming from Mr Trump, or from “some corporate affiliation thereof.”