- Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks have met with prosecutors probing a 2016 Trump hush money payment.
- Both could directly link Trump to the payment, federal prosecutors have said in the past.
Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway — two of Donald Trump's most trusted advisors in his improbable 2016 climb to the presidency — could now impact his 2024 campaign by directly linking him to a hush-money scheme from their earliest days together.
In the last week, both women have met with prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in his intensifying probe of felony records fraud and other potential illegalities surrounding the $130,000 payment, according to published reports.
Both Hicks and Conway directly tie Trump to the money-for-silence scheme, federal prosecutors have said in court papers from the 2019 prosecution of Michael Cohen, the former president's fixer-turned-nemesis, who admittedly brokered the payment and who is also meeting regularly with prosecutors.
Hicks, Trump's 2016 campaign press secretary and later his White House communications director, was seen Monday afternoon arriving at a lower Manhattan office building used in the DA's investigation, the Associated Press reported. She left some four hours later.
Conway, Trump's campaign manager turned senior advisor, likewise met with the DA on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.
It's unclear if Hicks and Conway merely were interviewed by prosecutors, or appeared before an ongoing grand jury, and either way, it's unknown if they are helping in the probe. The district attorney's office has declined to comment on the investigation.
The $130,000 was wired by Cohen to Daniels, through her attorney, on October 27, 2016, at Trump's direction, Cohen said three years later in explosive, televised Congressional testimony against the then-sitting president.
"He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair," Cohen told the committee, "and to lie about it to his wife, which I did."
Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison for the payments. and a series of other admitted crimes, including tax-dodging and lying to Congress about Trump's involvement in a plan to build a tower in Moscow, also on the then-president's behalf.
Cohen was the only person prosecuted for these crimes. But both Hicks and Conway were implicated in documents from the time as being aware of the payments to Daniels.
Hicks was in on a flurry of calls including Trump, Cohen, and two top executives at the National Enquirer, on October 8, 2016, the day after the publication of Trump's notorious Access Hollywood tape, prosecutors have alleged.
At 7:20 p.m. that day, Hicks joined a four-minute, three-way conference call with Trump and Cohen as they allegedly talked about safeguarding Clifford's silence, the feds alleged on pages 41 and 42 of a 269-page search warrant.
About ten minutes after that call, Cohen called David Pecker, the then-publisher of the National Enquirer and a personal friend of Trump. Three minutes after that call, Cohen received a call from Dylan Howard, former editor-in-chief at the Enquirer.
Some eight minutes after that call ended, Cohen called Hicks again, and they spoke for two minutes. By around 9 p.m. that night, Cohen got a text message from Howard saying that Clifford's lawyer had agreed to the hush money deal.
"So far I see only 6 stories. Getting little to no traction," Cohen later texted about Trump's alleged dalliance, federal filings also say. "Same. Keep praying!! It's working!" Hicks responded.
As for Conway, Cohen has described her connection to the hush-money payment in his 2020 memoir, "Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump."
When Cohen wanted to relay to Trump that Daniels had been paid off, it was Conway who relayed the message, he wrote.
She "called and said she'd pass along the good news," Cohen wrote.
Attorneys for Trump and Conway did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Hicks, Robert P. Trout, declined comment.