On Tuesday night, CNN aired an audio tape secretly recorded by Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen in September 2016 in which the two discuss potentially buying the rights to a former Playboy playmate’s account of her alleged affair with Trump.
Asked by George Stephanopolous on “Good Morning America” Wednesday if there are more tapes featuring Trump, Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis said suggestively that “there are certainly more tapes,” but declined to reveal if Trump is on them.
But Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s current lawyers, says that the existence of more Cohen tapes is irrelevant to his client because Trump’s not on any of them.
“There are no other tapes with the president,” the former New York City mayor told Fox News Tuesday night. “We have all of the tapes in our possession. We have transcripts of all them. We are comfortable with them. … There are no others.”
As for CNN’s “bombshell” audio, to which Trump’s team waived attorney-client privilege to release to the investigators, Giuliani shrugged it off, saying, “There’s no indication of any crime being committed on this tape.”
On the audio (below), Cohen can be heard saying, “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David [Pecker, AMI chair and CEO].”
“What financing?” Trump asks. At this point, the tape becomes muffled with only some phrases clearly audible. After Cohen replies “we’ll have to pay,” Trump says something about “pay with cash.”
Trump’s lawyers say he said, “Don’t pay with cash…check.” But Davis suggests that Trump is trying to convince his client to pay with “cash.”
Davis told CNN Tuesday that the tape proves that his client is innocent of any wrongdoing. The only person acting badly, he suggested, was Trump, whom he compared to a drug dealer and a mobster.
“The truth is that when Donald Trump said ‘cash,’ which Rudy Giuliani knows that only drug dealers and mobsters talk about cash, it was, you heard Michael Cohen … say what? ‘No, no, no, no,'” said Davis. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you voted for Donald Trump, listen to the tape and ask yourself: Is Donald Trump lying when he said he didn’t use the word ‘cash’ and accuses Michael Cohen of using the word ‘cash’?”
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer with the Trump Organization, says that the whole “cash” argument is overblown anyhow. “Whoever is telling Davis that ‘cash’ in that conversation refers to green currency is lying to him,” the lawyer told CNN Tuesday. “There’s no transaction done in green currency. It doesn’t happen. The whole deal never happened. If it was going to happen, it would be a payment to a large company that would obviously be accompanied by an agreement of sale. Those documents would be prepared by lawyers on both sides.”
On Fox & Friends Wednesday, Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz agreed with Trump’s camp that “There’s no crime here. There’s no impeachable offense here.” In the end, said Dershowitz, “no payments were made, no cash was given.”
Wednesday morning, Trump responded to CNN’s release of the tape by slamming Cohen for secretly recording his clients and pointing out that the tape appears to be “abruptly terminated (cut)”:
H/T Daily Mail
