Of all the senior aides who have worked for Donald Trump in recent years, it's safe to say that Hope Hicks was the most popular. As President Trump's surprisingly young communications director during the 2016 campaign and in the White House, she was unfailingly professional, polite and level-headed, by many people's reviews.
At 3:03 p.m. Friday, Hicks lost her composure and cried in the courtroom before her defense attorney, who had just begun cross-examination in President Trump's felony trial, asked for a break. And her tears were her gift to the prosecution.
The context is:
Minutes earlier, Ms. Hicks said she and President Trump had discussed the matter at the White House when Stormy Daniels' compensation became public in 2018, and that Mr. Trump had said that Michael Cohen was “kind-hearted.'' “I paid a porn star,” he told her, he testified. And she didn't tell anyone about it. ”
“I don't think that's befitting Michael Cohen,” Hicks told jurors. “I didn't know him to be a particularly philanthropic or selfless person.'' Rather, Cohen was “the kind of person who wanted credit.'' Later, under calm cross-examination by the defense, she said that his nickname “Trump Fixer” came from him. He was a repairman “just because he broke things to fix them.”
In other words, Hicks was not convinced by the president's pitch that the payments were Cohen's idea. After Hicks briefly pleased the defense by saying that President Trump had asked him to hide the newspaper so as not to upset his wife, he said:
“Mr. Trump's opinion was that it was better to address this issue now and that it was bad for the story to come out before the election.” In other words, he was more concerned about his wife's reaction than to They were concerned about the impact on the election, which is the basis for the charges.
After a few minutes, she began to cry, realizing that she was hurting a man who had been good to her. I think she is smart enough to realize that this is devastating testimony regarding the criminal intent at the heart of this case. The evidence prosecutors painstakingly assembled, from the enthusiastic response to the “Access Hollywood” tape (corroborated by Hicks' testimony on Friday) to emergency contacts with Cohen and Stormy Daniels' lawyers to Trump's tweets. Much of this builds toward establishing this motive. They expressed concern about losing women's votes in the upcoming election in a few days.
Earlier Friday, the Washington Post reported that Trump aides say Hicks still has warm feelings for her former boss. But they're not around anymore. She testified that she had not seen President Trump in at least 18 months, and both of them conspicuously looked away when she passed three feet to his right as she exited her stand.
On Friday afternoon, Hope Hicks obliged. She vowed to “speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” over her blind loyalty to her old boss, and experienced her pain in doing so.
