The president’s lawyer had a tape recorder and that’s a problem in more ways than one.
The New York Times reports that Michael Cohen secretly taped a discussion with then-candidate Trump, his boss, about making payments to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Now the FBI has seized the tapes.
This places the president in legal jeopardy because those payments may amount to illegal campaign contributions made by Trump to quiet the model and thereby influence the election. Rudy Giuliani, now the president’s personal attorney, confirmed the recording to the New York Times but insisted that the payment in question never actually happened.
“Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance,” Giuliani said before insisting somehow that the record was “powerful exculpatory evidence.”
Normally this would also be a moral quandary for the president. Once upon a time, people used to frown on married men cheating on their pregnant wives. But this president has advanced the sexual revolution for powerful politicians so the infidelity probably won’t matter much.
What will matter is whether Cohen recorded frequently. The president’s allies certainly don’t think it was an isolated incident. One source told the New York Times earlier this year that it was “standard practice.” And when the lawyer’s offices where raided earlier in the year, those same people started to worry that federal investigators had seized recordings.
“We heard he had some proclivity to make tapes,” said one Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. “Now we are wondering, who did he tape? Did he store those someplace where they were actually seized? … Did they find his recordings?”
It is obvious now that the FBI did find the recordings and it seems likely that, if there are more, we will find out more about them soon.
[Also read: Michael Cohen speaks, says his ‘first loyalty’ is to family, country]
