At the time of that recording, Cohen and Trump discussed buying the rights to McDougal’s story from American Media, the publisher of The National Enquirer, which had already purchased her story for $150,000. The Trump-friendly supermarket tabloid never ran her story that claimed she had an affair with Trump, in a tactic known by staffers at that newspaper as “catch-and-kill.”
Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, said on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday that there is more than just a single taped conversation between Trump and Cohen.
“I know the substance of some of the tapes,” Avenatti said on the program.
Daniels, 39, was paid $130,000 by Cohen on the eve of the 2016 presidential election in exchange for what she has said was her silence about her own sexual tryst with Trump.
Daniels said she had sex with Trump once, in 2006, the same year that McDougal has said she began a nearly yearlong affair with the future president, and the same year in which Melania Trump gave birth to their son Barron.
The White House has denied Trump had an affair with either woman. Both women were represented when they received the payments by the same lawyer, Keith Davidson.
Cohen’s office was raided April 9 by the FBI, which seized electronic devices and paper records containing more than 800,000 individual files, court records show.
The vast majority of files were deemed not protected by attorney-client privilege, and as a result were turned over to prosecutors who are conducting a criminal investigation of Cohen.
Cohen has yet to be charged with any crimes. Prosecutors are probing his business dealings, and his payment to Daniels, for which Trump later reimbursed him.
In recent weeks, he has taken a series of steps that have set him at odds with Trump, including hiring Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer who is close to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
On Saturday, Trump in a tweet suggested that Cohen had done something “illegal” by recording him.
But a source with knowledge of the conversation noted that New York, where Cohen’s talk with Trump about McDougal was made face-to-face, is a “one-party consent” state, which means that only one person in a discussion needs to know about a recording device for the taping to be legal.
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