A secretly recorded conversation between President Trump and his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was reportedly deemed privileged material by the special master reviewing a trove of documents and electronic files seized from Cohen by the FBI in April.
Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Friday that a source familiar with the situation told her the tape was protected by attorney-client privilege, “but the president’s attorneys waived the privilege.”
[Opinion: How many tapes of Trump did Michael Cohen have?]
Breaking: VF Source: Cohen Trump tape was deemed privileged by Special Master, privileged waved by Trump legal team. pic.twitter.com/wqQTJgc1Ww
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) July 21, 2018
“Effectively they waived privilege today by speaking about what was on the tape,” Fox said.
The New York Times reported earlier Friday that Cohen had secretly recorded a conversation with Trump in which they discussed a payment to a former Playboy model two months before the 2016 election.
Former Playboy model Karen McDougal was paid $150,000 for her story alleging she had an affair with Trump in 2006 by the publisher of the National Enquirer. The publisher never ran the story, and McDougal could not legally discuss it because she accepted the payment.
Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani told the Times that the recording lasts less than 2 minutes and “nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance.”
Giuliani explained Trump had instructed his former lawyer to pay McDougal with a check instead of cash so that it could be properly documented.
It’s not clear how the New York Times came to know about the tape. But Maddow and CNN host Chris Cuomo separately floated the theory that Trump’s team leaked the tape in order to distract from other scandals the president is currently facing.
“They had to have waived this privilege for someone to be able to leak it out because it would be too damaging otherwise,” Cuomo argued. “If you have something that is subject of attorney-client privilege and someone leaks it out, they’ve got a big problem, especially if that person is Michael Cohen, who is a lawyer.”
By allegedly leaking the tape, Maddow said, Trump’s team took away power from Cohen to offer investigators “something really valuable.”
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