Hope Hicks, who served as a counselor to former President Donald Trump, had an emotional breakdown while testifying in District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case in Manhattan.
Hicks started working for the former president just two years after she left college and had a long professional relationship with him, according to reports. She was previously called to testify before the House January 6 Committee, and now she’s involved in a case related to alleged payments made to adult movie actress Stormy Daniels. Hicks broke down in court, leading Judge Juan Merchan to call for a short recess on Friday.
After she testified for the prosecution, the defense attorney, Emil Bove, cross-examined her, and she quickly “broke down,” MSNBC reported.
“I want to talk to you about your time at the Trump Organization,” the attorney said to Hicks before she started to get emotional.
“Sorry about that,” she said after she came back to the witness stand.
“No, it’s okay,” the attorney for the former president said.
“Absolutely…I don’t think he wanted anyone in his family to be hurt or embarrassed about anything on the campaign. He wanted them to be proud of him,” Hicks testified.
Her testimony was an “epic miscalculation that backfired spectacularly” on the prosecution, Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said in a piece for Fox News.
“The account by Hicks demolishes District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s primary claim against Trump that he paid porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence with the intent to benefit his campaign and, thereby, influence the election by ‘unlawful means.’ To the contrary, it nicely corroborates the findings of a federal investigation that no crimes were committed, or campaign finance laws broken because there was another purpose for the non-disclosure agreement that Daniels signed,” he said.
“Like the prosecution witnesses before her, Hicks disparaged Bragg’s planned star witness, Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time personal lawyer. ‘He used to like to call himself Mr. Fix-It, but it was only because he first broke it.’ Ouch! But that denigrating remark is tame compared to the other derisive comments that have been leveled thus far at the insufferable Cohen, who is a convicted liar who went to prison,” he said.
“Hicks confirmed that Trump was aware that Cohen paid off Daniels to end what can fairly be described as aggressive blackmail demands. When the election drew near, Daniels ratcheted up her greedy scheme to profit from Trump by threatening to go public about a supposed affair, which he denied. Not incidentally, she renounced the purported tryst. Then, in a head-spinning maneuver, she recanted her repudiation,” the analyst said.
It was something that her former attorney, Michael Avenatti, said on X, formerly Twitter, from his prison cell.
“Keith Davidson is lying,” he said on Thursday. “After I confronted her w/ her own text msgs, Daniels admitted to me in early 2019 that she & Davidson had extorted Trump in Oct. 2016 – it was a shakedown.”
“This was one of the many reasons I fired her as a client in Feb. 2019,” he said.
Davidson served as the attorney for Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, assisting them in obtaining confidentiality agreements and payoffs.
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