Nervous, and at one point in tears, Donald Trump’s former communications director Hope Hicks on Friday told the jury in his criminal trialabout how he reacted in 2016 and 2018 when news reports surfaced about allegations of extramarital sexual encounters and his attempts to suppress them.
Hicks was Trump’s top press aide during his 2016 presidential campaign and later served as White House communications director. On the stand, she testified about how she and others in Trump’s orbit handled revelations about the “hush money” payments made to two women before the election.
Earlier in the trial, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified that Hicks had been “in and out” of a 2015 Trump Tower meeting where Pecker, Trump and Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney at the time, allegedly hatched the scheme to bury stories about Trump, a tactic now known as “catch and kill.”
