The key potential witnesses

A porn star, a president and a publisher named Pecker: The key potential witnesses at Trump’s criminal trial

Here’s the cast of characters who might take the stand in the hush money case.

By ERICA ORDEN

Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, scheduled to begin Monday, is set to feature a familiar cast of characters on the witness stand.

That’s because the felony charges against the former president center on a well-trodden sequence of salacious events: Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels; hush money payments to prevent Daniels from going public on the eve of the 2016 election; and the alleged scheme to falsify records tied to those payments.

But even though the allegations are widely known, some of the people most intimately involved in them have never spoken about them publicly. And beyond the episode involving Daniels, prosecutors may introduce evidence of two lesser-known efforts by Trump or people operating on his behalf to suppress negative stories about him during the 2016 campaign.

Though neither prosecutors with the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg nor Trump’s defense lawyers have publicly released their witness lists, some of the expected witnesses have been disclosed in court filings.

Here’s what we know about the people who might testify in the first criminal prosecution of a former president:

David Pecker

Pecker is the former CEO of American Media, Inc., which published the National Enquirer during the period when it executed so-called “catch and kill” schemes to bury negative stories about Trump.

One of the prosecution’s central goals will be to persuade jurors that Trump orchestrated the cover-up — and falsified his company’s records — as part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election, rather than merely to avoid personal embarrassment. Connecting the conduct to the election will help prosecutors maintain the charges against Trump as felonies, rather than misdemeanors. And Pecker may be a key witness on that point.

He is expected to testify about his efforts to aid Trump by brokering these deals, including any conversations he had with Trump or Cohen, as well as any communication he had with those being silenced — namely Daniels, or her representatives.

According to state prosecutors, Pecker, at the time a close friend and ally of Trump, met with Trump and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen in August 2015 at Trump Tower. Pecker, the prosecution says, agreed to help Trump’s presidential campaign by acting “as the ‘eyes and ears’ for the campaign by looking out for negative stories” about Trump and flagging them for Cohen before they were published. Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories about [Trump’s] competitors for the election.”

That fall, according to prosecutors, Pecker directed AMI to pay $30,000 to a former Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, who was attempting to shop a story about a “love child” Trump had fathered. Pecker did so “because of his agreement” with Trump and Cohen, prosecutors have said. After AMI concluded the story wasn’t true, Cohen instructed Pecker to keep the agreement with the doorman in place until after the presidential election, according to prosecutors.

In June 2016, according to prosecutors, Pecker, after consultation with Trump and Cohen, again came to Trump’s rescue. He directed AMI to pay $150,000 to a former Playboy Playmate, Karen McDougal, to keep her quiet about claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump. Pecker expected, based on his conversations with Cohen, that AMI would be reimbursed for the payment by either Trump or the Trump Organization, but that never happened.

In October 2016, Pecker aided Trump yet again, this time telling the National Enquirer editor-in-chief to alert Cohen to the fact that Daniels was claiming to have had a sexual encounter with Trump. Trump’s campaign had just been roiled by the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump boasted about sexual assault, and a potential sex scandal involving Daniels’ account would have further damaged the campaign. Cohen then struck the $130,000 deal with Daniels.

Pecker may also be questioned about a non-prosecution agreement that AMI signed with Manhattan federal prosecutors in August 2018 in conjunction with their prosecution of Cohen. In that agreement, the company admitted that it paid $150,000 to McDougal to ensure that she “did not publicize damaging allegations” about Trump “before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election.”

Pecker’s testimony will likely prove important because he can corroborate much of what Cohen is expected to testify about, and Pecker will come to the witness stand with far fewer credibility issues than Cohen.

Michael Cohen

Cohen stands at the center of the Daniels deal since he both paid Daniels and got reimbursed by Trump for the payment. That reimbursement resulted, according to prosecutors, in the very acts for which Trump is on trial: 34 counts of allegedly falsifying various business records to mask the true purpose of his payments to Cohen.

Here are the core topics Cohen is expected to testify about: his conversations with Pecker to forge the ongoing “catch and kill” agreement to benefit Trump; his involvement with each payment to suppress a negative story and what Trump directed him to do about it; and, perhaps most critically, his conversations with Trump about the Daniels payment and its timing around the election.

Cohen could also be questioned about his knowledge of Trump’s reaction to the Access Hollywood tape’s release. Prosecutors have said they will seek to persuade the jury that Trump was motivated to keep Daniels quiet in the wake of the release of that tape, so as not to further jeopardize his campaign just before Election Day.

Stormy Daniels

The porn star could be asked to testify about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump, her effort to go public with her story in 2016 and the contract she signed to agree to keep quiet about her allegations.

What may be of most interest to prosecutors, however, is her account of what happened when Cohen, at Trump’s direction, attempted to delay paying her until after the election “because at that point it would not matter if the story became public,” as state prosecutors put it in a court filing accompanying the indictment. That aspect of the timeline is likely critical to prosecutors because it speaks to their argument that Trump orchestrated the payment to Daniels to influence the election.

Hope Hicks 

Hicks was Trump’s campaign press secretary at the time of the Daniels deal, so prosecutors could question her about her knowledge of Trump’s efforts at the time to prevent the Daniels allegation from becoming public — and what, if anything, Trump privately communicated to her about its threat to his campaign.

Prosecutors may also ask Hicks about Trump’s reaction to the Access Hollywood tape. And they could question her about what she knew about the general “catch and kill” arrangement with Pecker.

In an affidavit filed in federal court, an FBI agent who investigated Cohen said Hicks had been involved in conversations about silencing Daniels, whose birth name is Stephanie Clifford.

“I have learned,” the agent wrote, “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. (“AMI”), the publisher of the National Enquirer, Trump, and Hope Hicks, who was then press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign.”

“Based on the timing of these calls, and the content of the text messages and emails,” the agent continued, “I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent Clifford from going public, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story.”

Karen McDougal 

Justice Juan Merchan has ruled that McDougal and Sajudin can be questioned about the payments they received from AMI to keep their stories quiet.

“The steps taken to secure the stories of McDougal and Sajudin complete the narrative of the agreement that was reached at the meeting” at the 2015 Trump Tower between Pecker, Cohen and Trump, Merchan wrote.

Bradley A. Smith 

Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and a law professor at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, is set to testify as an expert witness for the defense. He may help Trump’s lawyers rebut the prosecution’s theory that Trump’s reimbursements to Cohen violated campaign finance laws. If prosecutors can’t persuade the jury of that theory, they will have a harder time proving that the falsification-of-business-records charges count as felonies instead of misdemeanors.

Merchan has ruled that Smith can offer testimony on a limited selection of subjects, including general background on what the FEC is, background on who makes up the FEC, what its function is, what laws it’s responsible for enforcing and general terms and definitions “that relate directly to this case, such as for example ‘campaign contribution.’”

Donald Trump

Trump is the wild card here. The former president told reporters on Friday that he “absolutely” would take the stand. But it’s far from clear if he will stick to that plan.

His lawyers may be reluctant to call him as a witness, given his well-known credibility issues and his tendency to bloviate on the stand. But he may not be able to resist speaking in his own defense. That was true in both the recent civil fraud trial against him and in this year’s federal defamation trial in a lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump testified in both of those cases — and he lost both cases badly, with a pair of civil judgments totaling over a half-billion dollars. This time around, losing could mean something even graver: the prospect of prison.