Opinion | From Hope Hicks, the Tears of Truth – The New York Times
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Contributing Opinion Writer
Of all the senior aides who have worked for Donald Trump in recent years, it’s fair to say Hope Hicks was the most popular. As Trump’s surprisingly young communication director during the 2016 campaign and inside the White House, she was — by many accounts — unfailingly professional, polite and composed.
At 3:03 p.m. on Friday, in Trump’s felony trial, Hicks lost her composure, crying audibly in the courtroom before a defense attorney just beginning his cross-examination asked for a break. And her tears were gifts to the prosecution.
Here’s the context:
A few minutes earlier, Hicks testified that when the payoff to Stormy Daniels became public in 2018, she and President Trump discussed the matter in the White House and Trump told her that Michael Cohen had paid the porn star “out of the kindness of his heart and never told anyone about it.”
“I’d say that would be out of character for Michael Cohen,” Hicks told the jury. “I didn’t know him to be an especially charitable person or selfless person.” Cohen was, instead, “The kind of person who seeks credit.” Later, under gentle cross-examination from the defense, she said his moniker as “Trump’s fixer” came from him. He was a fixer “only because he broke it so that he could fix it.”
So Hicks wasn’t buying the story the president was selling her about the payment being Cohen’s idea. After briefly pleasing the defense by talking about how Trump had asked her to hide the newspapers from his wife so as not to upset her, Hicks said this:
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